about the past. They live in the present; they work for the present,
regardless of either past or future; their faces are turned ever
forward; they will not look back. They use the things of the past
because they are ready to hand; they would improve them if they could;
they would abolish them if they got in the way of advance. They are the
practical men, the administrators, the inventors, the engineers. For
such men the laws of their country, their liberties, the civic peace and
order which allow them to work undisturbed, all are ready made; they
found them here—they do not ask how they came. If they come across any
old thing and think that it is in their way, they sweep it off the earth
without the least remorse; they love a new building, a new fashion, a
new invention; they are the men who only see the Tower of London by
accident as they go up and down the river, and they think what a noble
site for warehouses is wasted by that great stone place. This is a very
large school; it embraces more than the half of civilized humanity.
Let me speak in this place of the Tower to the former school—the lesser
half.
Three hundred years ago Stow wrote of the Tower of London in these
words: “Now to conclude in summary. The Tower is a citadel to defend or
command the city, a royal palace for assemblies or treaties, a prison of
state for the most dangerous offenders, the only place of coinage for
all England, the armory for warlike provision, the treasury of the
ornaments and jewels of the Crown, the general conserves of the most
ancient records of the king’s courts of justice at Westminster.”
The history of the Tower would cover many sheets of long and gloomy
pages. There is no sadder history anywhere. Fortunately, we need not
tell it here. When you think of it, remember that it is still, as it
always has been, a fortress; it has been in addition a palace, a court,
a mint, a prison; but it has always been a fortress, and it is a
fortress still; at night the gates are shut; no one after dark is
admitted without the password; to the lord mayor alone, as a compliment
and a voluntary act of friendliness on the part of the Crown, the
password is intrusted day by day. The Tower was surrounded by a small
tract of ground called the Tower Liberties. Formerly the City had no
jurisdiction over this district. Even now the boundaries of the
Liberties are marked out again every three years by a procession
including the mayor of the Tower, the chief officials, including the
gaoler with his axe of office, and the school children carrying white
wands. They march from post to post; at every place where the broad
arrow marks the boundary the children beat it with their wands. In
former times they caught the nearest bystander and beat him on the spot,
in this way impressing upon his memory, in a way not likely to be
forgotten, the boundaries of the Tower Liberties. In such fashion, “by
reason of thwacks,” was the barber in the “Shaving of Shagpat” made to
remember the injunctions which led him to great honor. In every London
parish to this day they “beat the bounds” once a year with such a
procession. I know not if the custom is still preserved outside London.
But I remember such a beating of the bounds, long years ago, beside
Clapham Common, when the boys of the procession caught other boys, and,
after bumping them against the post, slashed at them with their wands.
We were the other boys, and there was a fight, which, while it lasted,
was brisk and enjoyable.
There are two places belonging to the Tower which should be specially
interesting to the visitor. These are the chapel, called “St. Peter ad
Vincula,” and the terrace along the river. The history, my American
friend, which this chapel illustrates is your property and your
inheritance, as much as our own. Your ancestors, as well as ours, looked
on while the people buried in the chapel were done to death. Look at
those letters “A. B.” They mark the grave of the hapless Anne Boleyn, a
martyr, perhaps: a child of her own bad age, perhaps—who knows? Beside
her lies her sister in misfortune,—no martyr, if all is true, yet surely
hapless,—Katherine Howard. Here lies the sweetest and tenderest of
victims, Lady Jane Gray; you cannot read her last words without breaking
down; you cannot think of her fate without tears. Here lies Sir Walter
Raleigh—is there anywhere in America a monument to the memory of this
illustrious man? For the rest, come here and make your own catalogue; it
will recall, as Macaulay wrote, “whatever is darkest in human nature and
in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with
all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame.”
The other place, the terrace along the river, is fit for the musing of a
summer afternoon. In front you have life—the life of the day; behind you
have life, but it is the life of the past. Nowhere in England can you
find such a contrast. Sit down upon this terrace, among the old, useless
cannon, among the children at play, and the contrast will presently
seize you and hold you rapt and charmed.
It is also the best place for seeing the gray old fabric itself, with
its ancient walls and towers of stone, its barbican, its ditch, its
gates, its keep, and the modern additions in brick and wood that have
grown up among the mediæval work—incongruities which still do not
disfigure. On the east of the Tower a new road has been constructed as
an approach to the Tower Bridge. From this road another and quite a new
view can now be obtained of the Tower, which from this point reveals the
number and the grouping of its buildings. I have not seen represented
anywhere this new side of the Tower.
I have said nothing all this time of London’s new gate. Yet you have
been looking at it from London Bridge and from the terrace. It is the
new Water Gate, the noblest and most stately gate possessed by any city:
the gate called the Tower Bridge. It is, briefly, a bascule bridge—that
is, a bridge which parts in the middle, each arm being lifted up to open
the way, like many smaller bridges in Holland and elsewhere, for a ship
to pass through. It was begun in 1884 and finished in 1894.
It consists of two lofty towers communicating with either shore by a
suspension bridge. There is a permanent upper bridge across the space
between the towers, access being gained from the lower level by lifts.
The lower bridge, on the level of the two suspension bridges, is the
bascule, which is raised up by weights acting within the two towers, so
as to leave the space clear.
The width of the central span is 200 feet clear; the height of the
permanent bridge is 140 feet above high-water mark, and the lower bridge
is 29 feet when closed. The two great piers on which the towers are
built are 185 feet long and 70 feet wide; the side spans are 270 feet in
the clear.
The bascule may be described as a lever turning on a pivot; the shorter,
and therefore the heavier, end is within the Tower. The weight at the
end of the lever is a trifle, no more than 621 tons. That of the arm,
which is 100 feet long, is 424 tons. If you make a little calculation
you will find that the action of one side of the pivot very nearly
balances that of the other, with a slight advantage given to the longer
side. You are not perhaps interested in the construction of the bridge,
but you must own that there is no more splendid gate to a port and a
city to which thousands of ships resort than this noble structure. The
bascule swings up about seventeen times a day, but the ships are more
and more going into the docks below, so that the raising of the arms is
becoming every day a rarer event. It is a pleasant sight to see the huge
arms rising up as lightly as if they were two deal planks, which the
great ship passes through; then the arms fall back gently and
noiselessly, and the traffic goes on again, the whole interruption not
lasting more than a few minutes—less time than a block in Cheapside or
Broadway.
[Illustration: The Water-Gate of London: Tower Bridge from the East Side
of the Tower.]
Beyond the Tower are the docks named after St. Katherine. They are so
named to commemorate an ancient monument and a modern act of vandalism
more disgraceful perhaps than any of those many acts by which things
ancient and precious have been destroyed.
On the site of those docks there stood for seven hundred years one of
the most picturesque and venerable of City foundations. Here was the
House called that of St. Katherine by the Tower. Its first foundress was
Matilda, queen of Stephen. She created the place and endowed it, in the
spirit of the time, in grief for the loss of two children who died and
were buried in the Church of the Holy Trinity Priory, Aldgate. Later on,
Eleanor, Queen of Edward I, added certain manors to the little
foundation, which had hitherto been but a cell to the Holy Trinity
Priory. She appointed and endowed a master, three brethren, three
sisters, the bedeswoman, and six poor clerks. Fifty years later, a third
Queen, Philippa, wife of Edward III, increased the endowments. We should
hardly expect this ancient foundation to survive to the present day, but
it has done so. The house was spared at the Dissolution; it was
considered peculiarly under the protection of the Queen consort, since
three queens in succession had endowed it. Therefore, while all the
other religious houses in the country were swept away this was spared;
it received a Protestant form; it was called a college, a free chapel, a
hospital for poor sisters. The warden, who received the greater part of
the endowment, became a dignified person appointed by the Queen, the
brethren and sisters remained, the bedeswoman remained, the endowment
for the six poor clerks was given to make a school. The precinct became
a Liberty, with its own officers, court, and prison; the buildings were
retired and quiet, in appearance like a peaceful college at Cambridge;
the warden’s house was commodious; the cloisters were a place for calm
and meditation; there was a most beautiful church filled with monuments;
there was a lovely garden, and there was a peaceful churchyard. Outside,
the precinct was anything but a place of peace or quiet. It was a tangle
of narrow lanes and mean streets; it was inhabited by sailors and sailor
folk. Among them were the descendants of those Frenchmen who had fled
across the Channel when Calais fell; one of the streets, called
Hangman’s Gains, commemorated the fact in its disguise, being originally
the Street of Hammes and Guisnes, two places within the English pale
round Calais.
This strange place, mediæval in its appearance and its customs,
continued untouched until some eighty years ago. Then—it is too terrible
to think of—they actually swept the whole place away; the venerable
church was destroyed; the picturesque cloister, with the old houses of
sisters and of brethren, the school, the ancient court house, the
churchyard, the gardens, the streets and cottages of the precinct, were
all destroyed, and in their place was constructed a dock. No dock was
wanted; there was plenty of room elsewhere; it was a needless, wanton
act of barbarity. They built a new church, a poor thing to look at,
beside Regent’s Park; they built six houses for the brethren and
sisters, a large house for the warden; they founded a school, they
called the new place St. Katherine’s. But it is not St. Katherine’s by
the Tower, and East London has lost the one single foundation it
possessed of antiquity; it has also lost the income, varying from
£10,000 to £14,000 a year, which belonged to this, its only religious
foundation.
In the modern chapel at Regent’s Park you may see the old monuments, the
carved tombs, the stalls, the pulpit, taken from the ancient church; it
is the putting of old wine into new bottles. Whenever I stand within
those walls there falls upon me the memory of the last service held in
the old church, when, amid the tears and lamentations of the people who
loved the venerable place, the last hymn was sung, the last prayer
offered, before the place was taken down.
Outside the docks begins the place they call Wapping. It used to be
Wapping in the Ouze, or Wapping on the Wall. I have spoken of the
embankment on the marsh. All along the river, all round the low coast of
Essex stands “The Wall,” the earthwork by which the river is kept from
overflowing these low grounds at high water. This wall, which was
constantly getting broken down, and cost great sums of money to restore,
was the cause of the first settlement of Wapping. It was in the reign of
Queen Elizabeth that people were encouraged to settle here, in order
that by building houses on and close to the wall this work would be
strengthened and maintained.
Stow says that about the year 1560 there were no houses here at all, but
that forty years later the place was occupied and thickly settled by
“seafaring men and tradesmen dealing in commodities for the supply of
shipping and shipmen.” If this had been all, there would have been no
harm done, but the place was outside the jurisdiction of the city, and
grave complaints were made that in all such suburbs a large trade was
carried on in the making and selling of counterfeit goods. The arm of
the law was apparently unable to act with the same vigor outside the
boundaries of the lord mayor’s authority. Therefore the honest craftsman
was encouraged by impunity to make counterfeit indigo, musk, saffron,
cochineal, wax, nutmegs, steel and other things. “But,” says Strype,
“they were bunglers in their business.” They took too many apprentices;
they kept them for too short a time, and their wares were bad, even
considered merely as counterfeits. The making of wooden nutmegs has
been, it will be seen, unjustly attributed to New England; it was in
vogue in East London so far back as the sixteenth century. The craftsmen
of the City petitioned James I. on the subject; a royal commission was
appointed who recommended that the City companies should receive an
extension of their power and should have control of the various trades
within a circle of five or six miles’ radius. Nothing, however, seems to
have come of the recommendation.
Before this petition, and even in the lifetime of Queen Elizabeth, there
was alarm about the growth of the suburbs; it was argued that there were
too many people already; they were too crowded; there were not enough
provisions for so many; if the plague came back there would be a
terrible mortality, and so on. Therefore orders were issued that no new
buildings should be erected within three miles of the City, and that not
more than one family should live in one house. Nothing could be wiser
than these ordinances. But nature is not always so wise as human
legislators. It is therefore credible that children went on being born;
that there continued to be marrying and giving in marriage; that the
population went on increasing; and, since one cannot, even in order to
obey a wise law, live in the open air, this beneficent law was set at
defiance; new houses were built in all the suburbs, and if a family
could not afford a house to itself it just did what it had always
done—took part of a house. In the face of these difficulties East London
began to create itself, and riverside London not only stretched out a
long arm upon the river wall, but threw out lanes and streets to the
north of the wall.
Not much of Wapping survives. The London docks cut out a huge cantle of
the parish; the place has since been still further curtailed by the
creation of a large recreation ground of the newest type. Some of the
remaining streets retain in their name the memory of the gardens and
fields of the early settlements; there is Wapping Wall, Green Bank, Rose
Lane, Crabtree Lane, Old Gravel Lane, Hermitage Street, Love Lane,—no
London suburb is complete without a Love Lane or a Lovers’
Walk,—Cinnamon Street: does this name recall the time of the wooden
nutmegs?
[Illustration: The Turn of the Tide on the Lower Thames.]
Let me, at this point, introduce you to Raine’s Charity. Did you know
that in our East London, as well as in the French village, we have our
Rosière? The excellent Raine, who flourished during the last century,
built and endowed a school for girls who were trained for domestic
service; he also left money for giving, once a year, a purse containing
a hundred golden sovereigns, upon her wedding day, to a girl coming from
his own school who could show four years’ domestic service with
unblemished character. On the occasion when I assisted at this function
there was observed—I do not think that the custom has since been
abolished—a quaint little ceremony. The wedding was held in the church
of St. George’s-in-the-East. This church, a massive structure of stone,
built a hundred and fifty years ago, stands a little off a certain
famous street once called Ratcliffe Highway. They have changed its name,
and shamed it into better ways. When the marriage was celebrated the
church was crowded with all the girls, children, and women of the
quarter. This spontaneous tribute to the domestic virtues, in a place of
which so many cruel things have been alleged, caused a glow in the bosom
of the stranger. Indeed, it was a curious spectacle, this intense
interest in the reward of the Rosière. The women crowded the seats and
filled the galleries; they thronged the great stone porch; they made a
lane outside for the passage of the bridal party; they whispered
eagerly, without the least sign of scoffing. When the bride, in her
white dress, walked through them they gasped, they trembled, the tears
came into their eyes. What did they mean—those tears?
After the service the clergyman, with the vestrymen, the bridal party,
and the invited guests, marched in procession from the church through
the broad churchyard at the back to the vestry hall. With the procession
walked the church choir in their surplices. Arrived at the vestry hall,
the choir sang an anthem composed in the last century especially for
this occasion. The rector of St. George’s then delivered a short
oration, congratulating the bride and exhorting the bridegroom; he then
placed in the hands of the bridegroom an old-fashioned, long silk purse
containing fifty sovereigns at each end. This done, cake and wine were
passed round, and we drank to the health of the bride and her
bridegroom. The bride, I remember, was a blushing, rosy maiden of two
and twenty or so; it was a great day for her,—the one day of all her
life,—but she carried herself with a becoming modesty; the bridegroom, a
goodly youth, about the same age, was proposing, we understood,
something creditable, something superior, in the profession of carter or
carman. It is more than ten years ago. I hope that the gift of the
incomparable Raine—the anthem said that he was incomparable—has brought
good luck to this London Rosière and her bridegroom.
The church of St. George’s-in-the-East stands, as I have said, beside
the once infamous street called the Ratcliffe Highway. It was formerly
the home of Mercantile Jack when his ship was paid off. Here, where
every other house was a drinking den, where there was not the slightest
attempt to preserve even a show of deference to respectability, Jack and
his friends drank and sang and danced and fought. Portugal Jack and
Italy Jack and Lascar Jack have always been very handy with their
knives, while no one interfered, and the police could only walk about in
little companies of three and four. Within these houses, these windows,
these doors, their fronts stained and discolored like a drunkard’s face,
there lay men stark and dead after one of these affrays—the river would
be their churchyard; there lay men sick unto death, with no one to look
after them; and all the time, day and night, the noise of the revelry
went on—for what matter a few more sick or dead? The fiddler kept it up,
Jack footed it, one Jack after the other, heel and toe with folded arms,
to the sailors’ hornpipe; there were girls who could dance him down,
there was delectable singing, and the individual thirst was like unto
the thirst of Gargantua.
The street, I say, is changed; it has now assumed a countenance of
respectability, though it has not yet arrived at the full rigors, so to
speak, of virtue. Still the fiddle may be heard from the frequent public
house; still Mercantile Jack keeps it up, heel and toe, while his money
lasts; still there are harmonic evenings and festive days, but there are
changes; one may frequently, such is the degeneracy, walk down the
street, now called St. George’s, without seeing a single fight, without
being hustled or assaulted, without coming across a man too drunk to
lift himself from the kerb. It is a lively, cheerful street, with points
which an artist might find picturesque; it is growing in respectability,
but it is not yet by any means so clean as it might be, and there are
fragrances and perfumes lingering about its open doors and courts which
other parts of London will not admit within their boundaries.
There are two squares lying north of this street; in one of them is the
Swedish church, where, on a Sunday morning, you may see rows of
light-haired, blue-eyed mariners listening to the sermon in their own
tongue. In a corner, if you look about, you may come upon the quaintest
little Jewish settlement you can possibly imagine; it is an almshouse,
with a synagogue and all complete; if you are lucky you will find one of
the old bedesmen to show you the place. St. George’s Street, also,
rejoices in a large public garden; no street ever wanted one so badly;
it is made out of the great churchyard, where dead sailors and dead
bargemen and dead roysterers lie by the hundred thousand. And one must
never forget Jamrack’s. This world-wide merchant imports wild beasts; in
his place—call it not shop or warehouse—you will find pumas and wildcats
of all kinds, jackals, foxes, wolves, and wolverines. It is a veritable
Ark of Noah.