the baser sort, so little reverence for the past, so little regard for
art; that these treasure-houses of precious marbles and rare carvings
should have been rifled and destroyed without raising so much as a
murmur; nay, that the very buildings themselves should have been pulled
down without a protest. Once only the citizens remonstrated. It was in
the hope of saving from destruction the lofty and most beautiful spire
of Austin Friars, but in vain. It seems to us impossible that the tombs
of so many worthies should have been destroyed without the indignation
of all who knew the story of the past. Yet in our own day we have
seen--nay, we see daily--the wanton and useless destruction of ancient
buildings. Winchester House, which ought to have been kept as a
national monument, was pulled down in 1839; Sir Paul Pinder's house,
another unique specimen, vanished only yesterday; within the last few
years a dozen city churches have been destroyed, in total disregard to
their historical associations. At this very moment the church where John
Carpenter, Whittington's executor and the founder of the City of London
school, the church whose site has been consecrated as long as that of
any church in the city, where King Alfred may have worshipped, is
standing roofless, waiting to make way for offices not wanted. Nay, the
very city clergy themselves, the official guardians of all that is
venerable, have, in our own days--the actual, living city
clergy!--basely sold their most beautiful old house, Sion College, and
built a new and garish place on the Thames Embankment, which they call
Sion College! It is unfortunately too true that there is not, at any
time or with any people, reverence for things venerable, old, and
historical, save with a few. The greater part are careless of the past,
unable to see or feel anything but the present. The city clergy of
to-day are no better than Sir Thomas Audrey, Sir Arthur Darcie, and the
rest.
There were other ruins. Cromwell's men were not the only zealots against
popish monuments, signs, and symbols. The parish churches were filled
with ruins. The carved fonts were defaced; the side chapels were
desolate and empty; the altars were stripped; the rood screens were
removed; the roods themselves were taken down; the painted walls were
whitewashed; the simple service that was read in the vulgar tongue
seemed to the people at first a ruin of the old mass; the clergyman,
called minister or priest, who preached in the black gown, was a ruin of
the priest in his gorgeous robes; the very doctrines of the Protestant
faith seemed at first built out of the ruins of the old, as the second
Temple was built upon the ruins of the first, and was but a poor thing
in comparison. At first only, because the work was thorough, and in a
single generation all the traditions of the ancient faith were lost and
forgotten.
If, indeed, the Reformation was to be carried at all, it was necessary,
for the prevention of civil war, that it should be thorough. Therefore
the young generation must be made to believe that a return of the old
things was absolutely impossible; that the old religion could never,
under any circumstances, be revived. When Queen Mary ascended the
throne, the work was only half done; the Protestant faith had not yet
taken root; yet when she died, five years later, no lamentations were
made over the second departure of the priests. It is a commonplace that
the flames of Smithfield, more than the preaching of Latimer, reconciled
the people to the loss of the old religion. I do not think that the
commonplace is more than half true, because the flames were again
kindled, and more than once, in the reign of Elizabeth without any
murmur from the people. Henceforth the old religion was dead indeed, and
impossible to be revived. When Shakespeare came up to London, he found
many who could remember the monks--gray, white, and black; the
Franciscan--innocent of the old simplicity; the rich and stately
Benedictine; the austere Dominican; the pardoner and the limitour; the
mass, and the holy days of the Church; but we find in Shakespeare's
writings no trace of any regret for their disappearance, or of any
desire for their return. The past was gone; even the poetic side of a
highly poetic time was not touched, or hardly touched, by the sadness
and pathos of this great fall; the dramatists and poets have made
nothing out of it.
[Illustration: THE VIEW OF LONDON BRIDGE FROM EAST TO WEST]
The people lived among the ruins but regarded them not, any more than
the vigorous growth within the court of a roofless Norman castle regards
the donjon and the walls. They did not inquire into the history of the
ruins; they did not want to preserve them; they took away the stones and
sold them for new buildings.
It was very remarkable and very fitting that on the site of the Grey
Friars' House should be erected a great school. The teaching of the new
thought was established in the place where those dwelt who had been the
most stalwart defenders of the old. It was also very remarkable and very
fitting that within the walls of Black Friars' Abbey, the home of
austerity and authority, should rise a play-house for the dramas of free
thought and human passion. It was further remarkable and very fitting
that the house of the Carthusian monks, those who had fled from the
work, and war, and temptations of the world, those who, while yet
living, were already dead, should be converted into a home for those who
were broken down and spent with that very work and war, a place where
they could meditate in their old age over the storm and struggle of the
past.
Once arrived at the second half of the sixteenth century we are in
modern times. We have maps, surveys, descriptions of the city; we have
literature in plenty to illustrate the manners of the time. There is no
longer any doubt upon any point. The daily life of London under
Elizabeth and the first James may be learned in all its details, by any
one who will take the trouble to read, as easily as the daily life in
our own time. Perhaps more easily, because things which are so trivial
and yet mean so much are passed over or taken for granted in the
literature of our day. But let no one be content with reading the modern
books upon the Elizabethan period. They contain a great deal, but the
literature of the time itself is a storehouse, into which every one who
wishes, however lightly, to study the time should look for himself. And
it is a storehouse so full that no man can hope to exhaust though he
could carry out of it load upon load of treasure.
[Illustration: THE POOL]
Before me hangs a fac-simile of the map made by Ralph Agas. "Civitas
Londinium." One remarks first, that the part lying south of Chepe is
still the most crowded, yet not so crowded that there are no open
spaces. Between Size Lane, for instance, and Walbrook is a great garden.
Behind Whittington College is a large open court, which was also
certainly a garden. There are gardens in Blackfriars of which the only
remains at the present day are the pretty little square called Wardrobe
Court and the tiny garden--I believe there is still one other garden
left--at the back of the rectory of St. Andrew's. North of Chepe the
streets are wider, and the open spaces larger and more frequent. At Grey
Friars, already the Bluecoat School, the courts of the monastery are yet
standing with the church, and the great garden still stretches unto the
city wall; in the corner of the wall, where is now Monkwell Street,
with Barber Surgeon's Hall, is a fine large garden. On either side of
Coleman Street there are very extensive gardens; those on the west
belonged to the Augustine Friars, the last remnant of which, the
Drapers' Garden, was built over a few years ago to the enrichment of the
Company and the loss of the city. Some part of the gardens of the Holy
Trinity Priory remain. There are gardens and trees and an open space
within Aldgate; and an open court, or series of courts, where had been
the nunnery of St. Helen's. Without the walls, on the east, East
Smithfield is a large field, with paths across. The sites of New Abbey
and the convent of the Clare Sisters are marked by courts and gardens.
Houses stand north and south along the Whitechapel Road, but not far; a
single row of houses runs along Hound's ditch from Aldgate to
Bishopsgate. Without the latter there is a line of houses as far as
Shoreditch Church, and here the open country begins. Finsbury and
Moorfields are to a great extent divided up into gardens, each with its
house, reminding one of Stubbes's complaint against the citizens' wives
and daughters, that they use their husbands' gardens outside the walls
for purposes of intrigue. All round the north and east of the city the
people could step out of the gates into the country. Except the houses
of Bishopsgate Without and the Whitechapel Road, there was nothing but
fields and open ground. Around St. Giles, Cripplegate, however, we find
a suburb already populous. About Smithfield the houses gather thickly.
We observe the familiar names of Little Britain, Pye Corner, Cock Lane,
and Hoosier Lane. Holborn, with gardens on the north, has a double line
of houses as far as Chancery Lane. Where is now Blackfriars Bridge Road
stood the palace of Bridewell, with its two square courts and its gabled
front facing the river. Whitefriars is partly built upon, but some of
the courts and gardens remain. The lawns of the Temple, planted with
elms, slope down to the river, and these were followed westward by the
palaces along the Strand--Exeter House, Arundel House, the Bishop of
Llandaff's house, Somerset House, the Savoy, Bedford House, Cecil House,
Northumberland House, and the rest, of which Somerset House alone
remains, and that in altered guise. There are no docks as yet. The
lading and the unlading of the ships continued almost until this century
to be done in the Pool below London Bridge by barges and lighters.
In considering the people of London in the time of good Queen Bess one
is forced to put the poets and dramatists first, because they are the
chief glory of this wonderful reign. Yet such a harvest could only
spring from a fruitful soil. Of such temper as were the poets, so
also--so courageous, so hopeful, so confident--were the inarticulate
mass for whom they sang and spoke. Behind Kit Marlowe, Greene, and Peele
were the turbulent youth, prodigal of life, eager for joy, delighting in
feast and song, always ready for a fight, extravagant in speech and
thought, jubilant in their freedom from the tyranny of the Church.
Behind Spenser and Sydney were the cultivated class, whose culture has
never been surpassed. Behind Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Massenger, and
Beaumont, and the rest were the people of all conditions, from Gloriana
herself down to Bardolph and Doll. We can only get at the people
through those who write about them. Therefore we must needs say
something about the Elizabethan poets.
Fortunately there are plenty of them. In proportion to the population,
far, very far more than we have even at the present day, when every year
the reviews find it necessary to cry out over the increasing tide of new
books. Of poets, in what other age could the historian enumerate forty
of the higher and nearly two hundred of the lower rank? Of the forty,
most are well remembered and read even to the present day; for instance,
Chapman, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Robert Greene, Marston, Sackville,
Sylvester, Donne, Drayton, Drummond, Gascoigne, Marlowe, Raleigh,
Spenser, Wither, may be taken as poets still read and loved, while the
list does not include Shakespeare and the dramatists. Nearly two hundred
and forty poets! Why, with a population of a hundred millions of
English-speaking people now in the world, we have not a half or a sixth
of that number, while in the same proportion we should have to equal in
number the Elizabethan singers--about 5000. But in that age every
gentleman wrote verse; the cultivation of poetry was like the
cultivation of music. Every man could play an instrument; every man
could take his part in a glee or madrigal; so, also, every man could
turn his set of verses, with the result of a fine and perfect flower of
poetry which has never been surpassed.
But they were not only poets. They had every kind of literature in far
greater abundance, considering the small number of educated people, than
exists in our own time, and in as great variety. Consider! There are
now scattered over the whole world a hundred millions of
English-speaking people, of whom at least five-sixths read something, if
it is only a penny newspaper, and at least a half read books of some
kind. In Elizabeth's reign there were about six millions, of whom more
than half could not read at all. The reading public of Great Britain and
Ireland, considered with regard to numbers, resembled what is now found
in Holland, Norway, or Denmark. Yet from so small a people came this
mass of literature, great, varied, and immortal.
In the matter of fiction alone they were already rich. There were
knightly books: the _Morte d'Arthur_, the _Seven Champions_, _Amadis of
Gaul_, _Godfrey of Bouillon_, _Palmerin of England_, and many more.
There were story-books, as the _Seven Wise Masters_, the _Gesta
Romanorum_, the _Amorous Fiammetta_, the jest books of Skogin, Tarleton,
Hobson, Skelton, Peele, and others. There was the famous _Euphues_,
Sidney's _Arcadia_, all the pastoral romances, and the "picaresque"
novels of Nash and Dekker. Then there were the historians and
chroniclers, as Stow, Camden, Speed, Holinshed; the essayists, as Sir
Thomas Browne, Ascham, Bacon; the theologians, of whom there were
hundreds; the satirists, as Bishop Hall and Marston; the writers of what
we should call light literature--Greene, Nash, Peele, and Dekker. And
there were translations, as from the Italian, Boccaccio, Ariosto,
Biondello, Tasso, and others; from the French, Froissart, Montaigne,
Plutarch (Amyot), the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ (in the _Hundred Merry
Tales_), and the stories of the _Forest_ and the _Palace of Pleasure_.
And there were all the dramatists. Never before or since has the
country been better supplied with new literature and good books.
Remember, again, everything was new. All the books were new; the
printing-press was new; you could almost count the volumes that had been
issued. It was reckoned a great thing for Dr. Dee to have three thousand
printed books. Every scholar found a classic which had not been
translated, and took him in hand. Every traveller brought home some
modern writer, chiefly Italian, previously unknown. Every sailor brought
home the record of a voyage to unknown seas and to unknown shores. It
was a time when the world had become suddenly conscious of a vast, an
inconceivable widening, the results of which could not yet be foretold.
But the knowledge filled men with such hopes as had never before been
experienced. Scholars and poets, merchants and sailors, rovers and
adventurers, all alike were moved by the passion and ecstasy of the
time. Strange time! Wonderful time! We who read the history of that time
too often confine our attention to the political history. We are able,
with the help of Froude, quite clearly to understand the perplexities
and troubles of the Maiden Queen; we see her, in her anxiety, playing
off Spaniard against Frenchman, to avoid destruction should they act
together. But the people know and suspect none of these things. State
affairs are too high for them. They only see the brightness of the sky
and the promise of the day; they only feel the quickening influence of
the spring; their blood is fired; they have got new hopes, a new faith,
new openings, new learning. And they bear themselves accordingly. That
is to say, with extravagances innumerable, with confidence and courage
lofty, unexampled. Why, it fires the blood of this degenerate time only
to think of the mighty enlargement of that time. When one considers when
they lived and what they talked, one understands Kit Marlowe and Robert
Greene, and that wild company of scholars and poets; they would cram
into whatever narrow span of life was granted them all--all--all--that
life can give of learning and poetry, and feasting and love and joy.
They were intoxicated with the ideas of their time. They were weighed
down with the sheaves--the golden harvest of that wondrous reaping. Who
would not live in such a time? The little world had become, almost
suddenly, very large, inconceivably large. The boys of London, playing
about the river stairs and the quays, listened to the talk of men who
had sailed along those newly-discovered coasts of the new great world,
and had seen strange monsters and wild people. In the taverns
men--bearded, bronzed, scarred--grave men, with deep eyes and low voice,
who had sailed to the Guinea coast, round the Cape to Hindostan, across
the Spanish Main, over the ocean to Virginia, sat in the tavern and told
to youths with flushed cheeks and panting, eager breath queer tales of
danger and escape between their cups of sack. We were not yet advanced
beyond believing in the Ethiopian with four eyes, the Arimaspi with one
eye, the Hippopodes or Centaurs, the Monopoli, or men who have no head,
but carry their faces in their breasts and their eyes in their
shoulders. None of these monsters, it is true, had ever been caught and
brought home; but many an honest fellow, if hard pressed by his hearers,
would reluctantly confess to having seen them. On the other hand,
negroes and red Indians were frequently brought home and exhibited. And
there were crocodiles, alive or stuffed; crocodiles' skins, the skins of
bears and lions, monkeys, parrots, flying-fish dried, and other curious
things. And there were always the legends--that of the land of gold, the
Eldorado; that of the kingdom of Prester John; that of St. Brandan's
Island; and, but this was later, the theory--proved with mathematical
certainty--of the great southern continent. Enough, and more than
enough, to inflame the imagination of adventurers, to drive the lads
aboard ship, to make them long for the sails to be spread and to be
making their way anywhere--anywhere--in search of adventure, conquest,
glory, and gold.
[Illustration: BURGHLEY HOUSE]
Such an enlargement, such hopes, can never again return to the world.
That is impossible, save on one chance. We cannot make the world any
wider; by this time we know it nearly all; the pristine mystery--the
awfulness of the unknown--has wellnigh gone out of every land, even New
Guinea and Central Africa. Yet there is this one chance. Science may and
will widen the world--for her own disciples--in many new and unexpected
ways. The sluggish imagination of the majority is little touched even by
such marvels as the electric telegraph, the phonograph, the telephone.
For them science in any form cannot enlarge their boundaries. Suppose,
however, a thing to be achieved which should go right home to the
comprehension, brain, and heart of every living man. Suppose that
science should prevent, conquer, and annihilate disease. Suppose our
span of life enlarged to two hundred, three hundred, five hundred years,
and that suddenly. Think of the wild exaltations, the extravagances,
the prodigalities, the omnivorous attempts of the scholar, the universal
grasp of the physicist, the amazing and audacious experiments of
chemist, electrician, biologist, and the long reach of the statesman!
Think of these things, I say, and remember that in the age of Elizabeth,
of Raleigh, Drake, Marlowe, Nash, Greene, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson,
Spenser, Bacon, and the rest similar causes produced similar effects.
* * * * *
We have seen the development of the mediæval house from the simple
common hall. The Elizabethan house shows an immense advance in
architecture. I believe that the noblest specimen now remaining is
Burghley House in Northamptonshire, built by Cecil, Lord Burghley and
first Earl of Exeter. The house is built about a square court. The west
front has a lofty square tower. Let us, with Burghley House before us,
read what Bacon directs as to building. The front, he says, must have a
tower, with a wing on either side. That on the right was to consist of
nothing but a "goodly room of some forty feet high"--he does not give
the length--"and under it a room for dressing or preparing place at
times of triumphs." By triumphs he means pageants, mummings, and
masques. "On the other side, which is the household side, I wish it
divided at the first into a hall and a chapel (with a partition
between), both of good state and bigness. And these not to go all the
length, but to have at the further end a winter and a summer parlor,
both fair." Here are to be the cellars, kitchens, butteries, and
pantries. "Beyond this front is to be a fair court, but three sides of
it of a far lower building than the front. And in all the four corners
of the court fair staircases, cast into turrets on the outside, and not
within the row of buildings themselves.... Let the court not be paved,
for that striketh up a great heat in summer and much cold in winter. But
only some side alleys with a cross, and the quarters to graze being kept
shorn, but not too near shorn." Stately galleries with colored windows
are to run along the banquet side; on the household side, "chambers of
presence and ordinary entertainments, with bedchambers." Beyond this
court is to be a second of the same square, with a garden and a
cloister. Other directions he gives which, if they were carried out,
would make a very fine house indeed. But these we may pass over. In
short, Bacon's idea of a good house was much like a college. That of
Clare, Cambridge, for instance, would have been considered by Bacon as a
very good house indeed, though the arrangement of the banqueting-room
was not exactly as the philosopher would have it. The College of
Christ's in its old form, with the garden square beyond, was still more
after the manner recommended by Bacon.
[Illustration: ILFORD ALMSHOUSES]
It will be seen that we are now a good way removed from the Saxon Hall
with the people sleeping on the floor, yet Bacon's house lineally
descends from that beginning. All the old houses in London were built in
this way, as may be illustrated by many which retain the old form, as
well as by those which remain. Hampton Court, for instance, built by
Wolsey; Northumberland House, recently taken down; Gresham House, taken
down a hundred years ago; Somerset House, still standing, though much
altered; the old Navy Office, the court of which still remains; some of
the old almshouses, notably Trinity Almshouse, in the Whitechapel Road;
Emanuel, Westminster; and the Norfolk Hospital, Greenwich, Gray's Inn,
Clifford's Inn, Staple Inn, Barnard's Inn--which contains the oldest
house in London--are admirable specimens of Bacon's house; while in the
old taverns, of which a few imperfect specimens still exist, we have the
galleries which Bacon would construct within his court.
In the reign of Elizabeth, while the merchants were growing richer and
increasing in number and in wealth, the great nobles were gradually
leaving the city. Those who remained kept up but a remnant of their
former splendor. Elizabeth refused license for the immense number of
retainers formerly allowed; she would suffer a hundred at the most. It
was a time rather for the rise of new families than the continued
greatness of the old. The nobles, as they went away, sold their London
houses to the citizens. Thus Winchester House and Crosby Hall went to
merchants; Derby House to the College of Heralds; Cold Harbor was pulled
down in 1590, and its site built over with tenements; the Duke of
Norfolk's house, on the site of Holy Trinity Priory, was shortly after
destroyed, and the place assigned to the newly-arrived colony of Jews.
Barnard's Castle alone among the city palaces remained in the possession
of a great noble until the fire came and swept it away.
[Illustration: OLD TAVERN]
Great beyond all precedent was the advance of trade in this golden age.
Elizabeth was wise and wisely advised in the treatment of the City and
the merchants. Perhaps she followed the example of King Edward the
Fourth. Perhaps she remembered (but this I doubt) that she belonged to
the City by her mother's side, for her great-grandfather, Sir Geoffrey
Boleyn, had been Lord Mayor a hundred years before her accession. But
the rapid growth of London trade seems to me chiefly due to the wisdom
of one man--Sir Thomas Gresham.
This great man, even more than Whittington, is the typical London
merchant. Not a self-made man at all, but coming of a good old country
stock--always a master, always of the class which commands. Nearly all
the great London merchants have, as has already been stated, belonged to
that class. His family came originally from Gresham, in Norfolk; his
father, Sir Richard, was Lord Mayor; his uncle, Sir John, also Lord
Mayor, saved Bethlehem Hospital at the dissolution of the religious
houses. Not a poor and friendless lad, by any means; from the outset he
had every advantage that wealth and station can afford. He was educated
at Gonville (afterwards Gonville and Caius) College, Cambridge. It was
not until he had taken his degree that he was apprenticed to his uncle,
and he was past twenty-four when he was received into the Mercers'
Company.