out to enlarge the area of freedom beyond seas still people it; but I
cannot say, and for the rest it is much crossed and recrossed by the
viaducts of the London and South Eastern Railway, under which we walked
the length of the long, dull, noisy thoroughfare. We were going to the
church of St. Olave, or Olaus, a hallowed Danish king from whose name
that of Tooley was most ingeniously corrupted, for the sake of knowing
that we were in the parish that sweet Priscilla Mullins, and others of
the Plymouth colony came from. The church is an uninteresting structure
of Wrennish renaissance; but it was better with us when, for the sake
of the Puritan ministers who failed to repent in the Clink prison,
after their silencing by Laud, came out to air their opinions in the
boundlessness of our continent. My friend strongly believed that some
part of the Clink was still to be detected in the walls of certain
water-side warehouses, and we plunged into their labyrinth after leaving
St. Olave's or St. Tooley's, and wandered on through their shades,
among trucks and carts in alleys that were dirty and damp, but
somehow whitened with flour as if all those dull and sullen piles were
grist-mills. I do not know whether we found traces of the Clink or not,
but the place had a not ungrateful human interest in certain floury
laborers who had cleared a space among the wheels and hoofs, and in the
hour of their nooning were pitching pennies, and mildly squabbling over
the events of their game. We somehow came out at Bankside, of infamous
memory, and yet of glorious memory, for if it was once the home of all
the vices, it was also the home of one of the greatest arts. The present
filthy quay figuratively remembers the moral squalor of its past in the
material dirt that litters it; but you have to help it recall the fact
that here stood such theatres as the Paris Garden, the Rose, the Hope,
the Swan, and, above all, the Globe.
[Illustration: ST. OLAVE'S, TOOLEY STREET.]
Here, Shakespeare rose up and stood massively blocking the perspective
of our patriotic researches, and blotting out all minor memories. But
if this was a hardship it was one which constantly waits upon the
sympathetic American in England. It is really easier to stay at home,
and make your inquiries in that large air where the objects of your
interest are placed at ample intervals, than to visit the actual scene
where you will find them crowding and elbowing one another, and perhaps
treading down and pushing back others of equal import which you had not
in mind. England has so long been breeding greatness of all kinds, and
her visionary children press so thick about her knees, that you cannot
well single one specially out when you come close; it is only at a
distance that you can train your equatorial upon any certain star, and
study it at your ease. This tremendous old woman who lives in a shoe so
many sizes too small more than halves with her guests her despair in the
multitude of her offspring, and it is best to visit her in fancy if
you wish their several acquaintance. There at Bankside was not only
Shakespeare suddenly filling that place and extending his vast shadow
over the region we had so troublesomely passed through, but now
another embarrassment of riches attended us. We were going to visit St.
Saviour's Church, because John Harvard, the son of a butcher in that
parish was baptized in it, long before he could have dreamed of Emanuel
College at Cambridge, or its outwandering scholars could have dreamed of
naming after him another college in another Cambridge in another world.
Our way lay through the Borough Market, which is for Southwark in fruits
and vegetables, and much more in refuse and offal, what Covent Garden
Market is for the London beyond Thames; and then through a wide troubled
street, loud with coming and going at some railway station. Here we
suddenly dropped into a silent and secluded place, and found ourselves
at the door of St. Saviour's. Outside it has been pitilessly restored in
a later English version of the Early English in which it was built, and
it has that peculiarly offensive hardness which such feats of masonry
seem to put on defiantly; but within much of the original architectural
beauty lingers, especially in the choir and Lady Chapel. We were not
there for that beauty, however, but for John Harvard's sake; yet no
sooner were we fairly inside the church than our thoughts were rapt from
him to such clearer fames as those of Philip Massinger, the dramatist;
Edmund Shakespeare, the great Shakespeare's younger brother; John
Fletcher, of the poetic firm of Beaumont and Fletcher; the poet Edward
Dyer; and yet again the poet John Gower, the “moral Gower” who so
insufficiently filled the long gap between Chaucer and Spencer, and who
rests here with a monument and a painted effigy over him. Besides these
there are so many actors buried in it that the church is full of the
theatre, and it might well dispute with our own Little Church Round the
Corner, the honor of mothering the outcast of other sanctuaries; though
it rather more welcomes them in their funeral than their nuptial rites.
Among the tablets and effigies there was none of John Harvard in St.
Saviour's, and we were almost a year too early for the painted window
which now commemorates him.
[Illustration: LONDON BRIDGE.]
One might leave Southwark rather glad to be out of it, for in spite
of its patriotic and poetic associations it is a quarter where the
scrupulous house-keeping of London seems for once to fail. In such
streets as we passed through, and I dare say they were not the best,
the broom and the brush and the dust-pan strive in vain against the dirt
that seems to rise out of the ground and fall from the clouds. But many
people live there, and London Bridge, by which we crossed, was full of
clerks and shop-girls going home to Southwark; for it was one o'clock on
a Saturday, and they were profiting by the early closing which shuts the
stores of London so inexorably at that hour on that day. We made our
way through them to the parapet for a final look at that stretch of
the Thames where Cromwell as unwillingly as unwittingly perhaps stepped
ashore to come into a kingdom.
[Footnote: While the reader is sharing our emotion in the scene of
the problematical event, I think it a good time to tell him that the
knowledge of which I have been and expect to be so profuse in these
researches, is none of mine, except as I have cheaply possessed myself
of it from the wonderful hand-book of Peter Cunningham, which Murray
used to publish as his guide to London, and which unhappily no one
publishes now. It is a bulky volume of near six hundred pages, crammed
with facts more delightful than any fancies, and its riches were
supplemented for me by the specific erudition of my friend, the
genealogist, Mr. Lothrop Withington, who accompanied my wanderings,
and who endorses all my statements. The reader who doubts them (as I
sometimes do) may recur to him at the British Museum with the proper
reproaches if they prove mistaken.]
We were going from St. Saviour's in Southwark where Harvard was baptized
to St. Catherine Cree in the city where Sir Nicholas Throgmorton's
effigy lies in the chancel, and somewhat distantly relates itself to our
history through his daughter's elopement with Sir Walter Raleigh. But
now for a mere pleasure, whose wantonness I shall not know how to excuse
to the duteous reader, we turned aside to the church of St. Magnus at
the end of the bridge, and I shall always rejoice that we did so, for
there I made the acquaintance of three of the most admirable cats in
London. One curled herself round the base of a pillar of the portico,
which was formerly the public thoroughfare to London Bridge; another
basked in the pretty garden which now encloses the portico, and let the
shifting shadows of the young sycamores flicker over her velvet
flank; the third arched a majestic back and rubbed against our legs in
accompanying us into the church. There was not much for us to see there,
and perhaps the cat was tired of knowing that the church was built by
Wren, after the great fire, and has a cupola and lantern thought to be
uncommonly fine. Certainly it did not seem to share my interest in
the tablet to Miles Coverdale, once rector of St. Magnus and bishop
of Exeter, at which I started, not so much because he had directed
the publication of the first complete version of the English Bible, as
because he had borne the name of a chief character in _The Blithedale
Romance_. I am afraid that if the cat could have supposed me to be
occupied with such a trivial matter it would not have purred so civilly
at parting, and I should not have known how to justify myself by
explaining that the church of St. Magnus was more illustriously
connected with America through that coincidence than many more
historical scenes.
[Illustration: THE ANCIENT CHURCH OF ST. MAGNUS.]
The early closing had already prevailed so largely in the city, that
most of the churches were shut, and we were not aware of having got into
St. Catherine Cree's at the time we actually did so. We were grateful
for getting into any church, but we looked about us too carelessly to
identify the effigy of Sir Nicholas, who was, after all, only a sort of
involuntary father-in-law of Virginia. That was what we said to console
ourselves afterwards; but now, since we were, however unwittingly,
there, I feel that I have some right to remind the reader that our enemy
(so far as we are of Puritan descent) Archbishop Laud consecrated the
church with ceremonies of such high ecclesiastical character that his
part in them was alleged against him, and did something to bring him
to the block. That Inigo Jones is said to have helped in designing the
church, and that the great Holbein is believed to be buried in it, and
would have had a monument there if the Earl of Arundel could have found
his bones to put it over, are sufficiently irrelevant details.
The reader sees how honest I am trying to be with him, and I will not
conceal from him that Duke Street, down a stretch of which I looked,
because the wife of Elder Brewster of Plymouth Colony was born and bred
there, was as dull a perspective of mean modern houses as any in
London. It was distinctly a relief, after paying this duty, to pass,
in Leadenhall Street, the stately bulk of India House, and think of the
former occupying the site, from which Charles Lamb used to go early in
compensation for coming so late to his work there. It was still better
when, by an accident happier than that which befell us at St. Catherine
Cree's, we unexpectedly entered by a quaint nook from Bishopsgate Street
to the church of St. Ethelburga, which has a claim to the New-Yorker's
interest from the picturesque fact that Henry Hudson and his ship's
company made their communion in it the night before he sailed away to
give his name to the lordliest, if not the longest of our rivers, and to
help the Dutch found the Tammany régime, which still flourishes at the
Hudson's mouth. The comprehensive Cunningham makes no mention of the
fact, but I do not know why my genealogist should have had the misgiving
which he expressed within the overhearing of the eager pew-opener
attending us. She promptly set him right. “Oh, 'e did _mike_ it 'ere,
sir. They've been and searched the records,” she said, so that the
reader now has it on the best authority.
I wish I could share with him, as easily as this assurance, the
sentiment of the quaint place, with its traces of Early English
architecture, and its look of being chopped in two; its intense quiet
and remoteness in the heart of the city, with the slop-pail of its
pew-opener mingling a cleansing odor with the ancient smells which
pervade all old churches. But these things are of the nerves and may
not be imparted, though they may be intimated. As rich in its way as
the sentiment of St. Ethelburga was that of the quiescing streets of the
city, that pleasant afternoon, with their shops closed or closing, and
the crowds thinned or thinning in their footways and wheelways, so that
we got from point to point in our desultory progress, incommoded only by
other associations that rivalled those we had more specifically in mind.
History, of people and of princes, finance, literature, the arts of
every kind, were the phantoms that started up from the stones and the
blocks of the wood-pavement and followed or fled before us at every
step. As I have already tried to express, it is always the same story.
London is too full of interest, and when I thought how I could have gone
over as much ground in New York without anything to distract me from
what I had in view, I felt the pressure of those thick London facts
almost to suffocation. Nothing but my denser ignorance saved me
from their density, as I hurried with my friend through air that any
ignorance less dense would have found impassable with memories.
[Illustration: THE EAST INDIA HOUSE OF CHARLES LAMB'S TIME.]
As it was I could draw a full breath unmolested only when we dropped
down a narrow way from Bishopsgate Street to the sequestered place
before the church of the Dutch refugees from papal persecutions
in France and the Netherlands. Here was formerly the church of the
Augustine Friars, whose community Henry VIII. dissolved, and whose
church his son Edward VI. gave to the “Germans” as he calls the
Hollanders in his boyish diary. It was to our purpose as one of the
beginnings of New York, for it is said that New Amsterdam was first
imagined by the exiles who worshipped in it, and who planned the
expedition of Henry Hudson from it. Besides this historic or mythic
claim, it had for me the more strictly human interest of the sign-board
in Dutch, renewed from the earliest time, at both its doorways,
notifying its expatriated congregation that all letters and parcels
would be received there for them; this somehow intimated that the
refugees could not have found it spiritually much farther to extend
their exile half round the world. Cunningham says that “the church
contains some very good decorated windows, and will repay examination,”
but, like the early-closing shops all round it, the Dutch church
was shut that Saturday afternoon, and we had to come away contenting
ourselves as we could with the Gothic, fair if rather too freshly
restored, of the outside. I can therefore impartially commend the
exterior to our Knickerbocker travellers, but they will readily find the
church in the rear of the Bank of England, after cashing their drafts
there, and judge for themselves.
Philadelphians of Quaker descent will like better to follow my friend
with me up Cheapside, past the Bowbells which ring so sweet and clear in
literature, and through Holborn to Newgate which was one of the several
prisons of William Penn. He did not go to it without making it so
hard for the magistrates trying him and his fellow-Quakers for
street-preaching that they were forced to over-ride his law and logic,
and send him to jail in spite of the jury's verdict of acquittal; such
things could then be easily done. In self-justification they committed
the jury along with the prisoners; that made a very perfect case for
their worships, as the reader can find edifyingly and a little amusingly
set forth in Maria Webb's story of _The Penns and the Penningtons_. As
is known, the persecution of Penn wellnigh converted his father, the
stiff old admiral, who now wrote to him in Newgate: “Son William, if you
and your friends keep to your plain way of preaching, and your plain way
of living, you will make an end of the priests to the end of the world
... Live in love. Shun all manner of evil, and I pray God to bless you
all; and He will bless you.”
Little of the old Newgate where Penn lay imprisoned is left; a
spic-and-span new Newgate, still in process of building, replaces it,
but there is enough left for a monument to him who was brave in such
a different way from his brave father, and was great far beyond the
worldly greatness which the admiral hoped his comely, courtly son would
achieve. It was in Newgate, when he was cast there the second time in
three months, that he wrote _The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience_,
and three minor treatises. He addressed from the same prison a letter to
Parliament explaining the principles of Quakerism, and he protested to
the sheriff of London against the cruelties practised by the jailors of
Newgate on prisoners too poor to buy their favor. He who was rich and
well-born preferred to suffer with these humble victims; and probably
his oppressors were as glad to be rid of him in the end as he of them.
[Illustration: CHURCH OF THE DUTCH REFUGEES.]
One may follow Penn (though we did not always follow him to all, that
Saturday afternoon), to many other places in London: to the Tower, where
he was imprisoned on the droll charge of “blasphemy,” within stone's
throw of All Hallow's Barking, where he was christened; to Grace Church
Street, where he was arrested for preaching; to Lincoln's Inn, where he
had chambers in his worldlier days; to Tower Street, where he went to
school; to the Fleet, where he once lived within the “rules” of the
prison; to Norfolk Street, where he dwelt awhile almost in hiding from
the creditors who were pressing him, probably for the public debt of
Pennsylvania.
We followed him only to Newgate, whence we visited the church of St.
Sepulchre hard by, and vainly attempted to enter, because Roger Williams
was christened there, and so connected it with the coming of toleration
into the world, as well as with the history of the minute province
of Rhode Island, which his spirit so boundlessly enlarged. We failed
equally of any satisfactory effect from Little St. Helen's, Bishopsgate,
possibly because the Place was demolished a hundred and five years
before, and because my friend could not quite make out which neighboring
street it was where the mother of the Wesleys was born. But we did what
we could with the shield of the United States Consulate-General in the
Place, and in an adjoining court we had occasion for seriousness in
the capers of a tipsy Frenchman, who had found some boys playing at
soldiers, and was teaching them in his own tongue from apparently vague
recollections of the manual of arms. I do not insist that we profited by
the occasion; I only say that life likes a motley wear, and that he who
rejects the antic aspects it so often inappropriately puts on is no true
photographer.
After all, we did not find just the street, much less the house, in
which Susannah Annesley had lived before she was Mrs. Wesley, and long
before her sons had imagined Methodism, and the greater of them had
borne its message to General Oglethorpe's new colony of Georgia. She
lies in Bunhill Fields near Finsbury Square, that place sacred to so
many varying memories, but chiefly those of the Dissenters who leased
it, because they would not have the service from the book of Common
Prayer read over them. There her dust mingles with that of John Bunyan,
of Daniel de Foe, of Isaac Watts, of William Blake, of Thomas Stothard,
and a multitude of nameless or of most namable others. The English crowd
one another no less under than above the ground, and their island is as
historically as actually over-populated. As I have expressed before, you
can scarcely venture into the past anywhere for a certain association
without being importuned by a score of others as interesting or more
so. I have, for instance, been hesitating to say that the ancestor
of Susannah was the Reverend Samuel Annesley who was silenced for his
Puritanism in his church of St. Giles Cripplegate, because I should have
to confess that when I visited his church my thoughts were rapt from
the Reverend Samuel and from Susannah Annesley, and John Wesley, and
the Georgian Methodists to the far mightier fame of Milton, who lies
interred there, with his father before him, with John Fox, author of
_The Book of Martyrs_, with Sir Martin Frobisher, who sailed the western
seas when they were yet mysteries, with Margaret Lucy, the daughter of
Shakespeare's Sir Thomas. There, too, Cromwell was married, when a youth
of twenty-one, to Elizabeth Bowchier. Again, I have had to ask myself,
what is the use of painfully following up the slender threads afterwards
woven into the web of American nationality, when at any moment the clews
may drop from your heedless hands in your wonder at some which are the
woof of the history of the world? I have to own even here that the more
storied dead in Bunhill Fields made me forget that there lay among them
Nathaniel Mather of the kindred of Increase and Cotton.
[Illustration: BOW-BELLS (ST. MARY-LE-BOW, CHEAPSIDE).]
That is a place which one must wish to visit not once, but often, and I
hope that if I send any reader of mine to it he will fare better than
we did, and not find it shut to the public on a Sunday morning when it
ought to have been open. But the Sabbatarian observances of England are
quite past the comprehension of even such semi-aliens as the Americans,
and must baffle entire foreigners all but to madness. I had already seen
the Sunday auctions of the poor Jews in Petticoat Lane, which are licit,
if not legal, and that Sunday morning before we found Bunhill Fields
fast closed, we had found a market for poor Christians wide open in
Whitecross Street near by. It was one of several markets of the kind
which begin early Saturday evening, and are suffered by a much-winking
police to carry on their traffic through the night and till noon the
next day. Then, at the hour when the Continental Sunday changes from
a holy day to a holiday, the guardians of the public morals in London
begin to urge the hucksters and their customers to have done with
their bargaining, and get about remembering the Sabbath-day. If neither
persuasions nor imperatives will prevail, it is said that the police
sometimes call in the firemen and rake the marketplace with volleys from
the engine-hose. This is doubtless effective, but at the hour when we
passed through as much of Whitecross Street as eyes and nose could bear,
it was still far from the time for such an extreme measure, and the
market was flourishing as if it were there to stay indefinitely.
Everything immediately imaginable for the outside or inside of man
seemed on sale: clothing of all kinds, boots and shoes, hats and caps,
glassware, iron-ware; fruits and vegetables, heaps of unripe English
hazelnuts, and heaps of Spanish grapes which had failed to ripen on the
way; fish, salt and fresh, and equally smelling to heaven; but, above
all, flesh meats of every beast of the field and every bird of the
barnyard, with great girls hewing and hacking at the carnage, and
strewing the ground under their stands with hoofs and hides and claws
and feathers and other less namable refuse. There was a notable absence
among the hucksters of that coster class which I used to see in London
twenty odd years before, or at least an absence of the swarming buttons
on jackets and trousers which used to distinguish the coster. But among
the customers, whose number all but forbade our passage through the
street, with the noise of their feet and voices, there were, far beyond
counting, those short, stubbed girls and women as typically cockney
still as the costers ever were. They were of a plinth-like bigness
up and down, and their kind, plain, common faces were all topped with
narrow-brimmed sailor-hats, mostly black. In their jargoning hardly
an aspirate was in its right place, but they looked as if their hearts
were, and if no word came from their lips with its true quality, but
with that curious soft London slur or twist, they doubtless spoke a
sound business dialect.
When we traversed the dense body of the market and entered Roscoe Street
from Whitecross, we were surprisingly soon out of its hubbub in a quiet
befitting the silent sectaries, who once made so great a spiritual
clamor in the world. We were going to look at the grave of George Fox,
because of his relation to our colonial history in Pennsylvania
and Rhode Island, and we thought it well to look into the Friends'
Meeting-house on the way, for a more fitting frame of mind than we might
have brought with us from Whitecross Street. A mute sexton welcomed us
at the door, and held back for us the curtain of the homely quadrangular
interior, where we found twoscore or more of such simple folk as Fox
might have preached to in just such a place. The only difference was
that they now wore artless versions of the world's present fashions
in dress, and not the drabs of out-dated cut which we associate with
Quakerism. But this was right, for that dress is only the antiquated
simplicity of the time when Quakerism began; and the people we now saw
were more fitly dressed than if they had worn it. We sat with them a
quarter of an hour in the stillness which no one broke, the elders on
the platform, with their brows bowed on their hands, apparently more
deeply lost in it than the rest. Then we had freedom (to use their
gentle Quaker parlance) to depart, and I hope we did so without offence.
Cunningham says that Fox was buried in Bunhill Fields, but he owns there
is no memorial of him there; and there is a stone to mark his grave in
the grassy space just beyond the meeting-house in Roscoe Street. If that
is really his last resting-place, he lies under the shadow of a certain
lofty warehouse walls, and in the shelter of some trees which on that
sunny First Day morning stirred in the breeze with the stiffness by
which the English foliage confesses before the fall it drops sere and
colorless to the ground. Some leaves had already fallen about the simple
monumental stone, and now they moved inertly, and now again lay still.