Milton's England Part 14

The chapel, built in the last half of the thirteenth century, is the oldest part that remains. An opening into Cranmer's ancient "parloir" is now the organ-loft. From the chancel one has a glimpse of the original beautiful ceiling. The wall pillars of Purbeck marble in the atrium are said to be one thousand years old. In this chapel two of the first American bishops were consecrated. The oak screen was erected by Archbishop Laud. This chapel contained the windows that were destroyed in the Civil Wars, which served as such a theme of controversy in Laud's trial. He testified as follows: "The first thing the Commons have in their evidence against me, is the setting up and repairing Popish images and pictures in the gla.s.s windows of my chapel at Lambeth, and amongst others the picture of Christ hanging on the cross between two thieves in the east window; of G.o.d the Father in the form of a little old man with a glory, striking Miriam with a leprosy; of the Holy Ghost descending in the form of a dove; and of Christ's Nativity, Last Supper, Resurrection, Ascension, and others.... To which I answer first, That I did not get these images up, but found them there before; Secondly, that I did only repair the windows which were so broken, and the chapel, which lay so nastily before that I was ashamed to behold, and could not resort to it but with some disdain, which caused me to repair it to my great cost; Thirdly, that I made up the history of these old broken pictures, not by any pattern in the ma.s.s book, but only by help of the fragments and remainders of them which I compared with the story." It is related that at a dinner of the domestics during Laud's primacy, the king's jester p.r.o.nounced the grace, "Give great praise to G.o.d, but little Laud to the devil," for which jest he paid by long imprisonment.

In the so-called "Lollards' Tower" at the west end of the chapel, the only part of the existing palace that is built of stone, is a niche in which was placed the image of St. Thomas a Becket, to which Dean Stanley tells us "the watermen of the Thames doffed their caps as they rode in their countless barges."

The small room at the top of the tower is wainscoted with oak over an inch thick, upon which prisoners chained to its iron rings have carved words in early English and Latin. Through the oubliette in the floor dead prisoners were doubtless dropped into the Thames, which in former days washed the very walls of Lambeth, and swept under this tower. Whether any Lollards were ever lodged here is very doubtful, although it is true that Wyclif, the arch-Lollard, was at one time examined for his opinions, by the bishops at Lambeth. The real Lollards' Tower seems to have been an adjunct of old St. Paul's Cathedral. More probably the prisoners here were Episcopalians of Milton's own time.

In the dark crypt, the wretched queen, Anne Boleyn, heard from the lips of Cranmer the annulment of her marriage with Henry, and was forced to affirm the disinheritance of her offspring. From thence she went to the Tower and her doom. In this same palace, where she lay a prisoner in 1533, her predecessor, Katharine of Aragon, was a guest on her arrival in England in 1501. Milton must doubtless sometime have visited this princely residence, and have mused upon the martyred Cranmer and Latimer and Sir Thomas More, and the long list of kings and queens and men, who, as masters, guests, or prisoners, have slept within these walls. Of all the noted men who were connected with Lambeth in his day, none, of course, so stirred his spirit as did Archbishop Laud, who lived here, and exercised his power in the Star Chamber, during the years when Parliament was silenced. From 1633 until his committal to the Tower on the charge of treason in 1641 after the a.s.sembling of the Long Parliament, he was master here. It was while here at Lambeth that he supervised the compilation of the Service Book; when this was enforced in 1637 upon the Scottish churches, it was so repugnant to them that the riot begun in Edinburgh, by Jenny Geddes flinging her stool in St. Giles's Cathedral at the bishop's head, initiated a national revolt, which led to the signing of the famous Scottish National Covenant. Milton at this time, at the age of thirty, was living at Horton. Little by little the resolute archbishop came to be looked upon by men of Milton's way of thinking as one whose system demanded submission to absolutism in the state. The student of Milton's prose writings is familiar with the troublous history of Laud's time, and the ludicrously trivial matters that then estranged earnest men. But, while the ceremonies permitted in the church two generations later were practically those that Laud had so zealously striven for, the result, says Gardiner, "was only finally attained by a total abandonment of all Laud's methods. What had been impossible to effect in a church to the wors.h.i.+p of which every person in the land was obliged to conform, became possible in a church which any one who pleased was at liberty to abandon."

After Laud's execution the see of Canterbury was vacant nearly seventeen years. Among the many portraits of the archbishops which hang at Lambeth, the portrait of Laud by Van Dyck is one of the most admirable. We read that his successor, Sheldon, in 1665, in the time of the Great Plague, "continued in his palace at Lambeth whilst the contagion lasted, preserving by his charities mult.i.tudes who were sinking under disease and want, and by his pastoral exertions procured benevolences to a vast amount." Admission to Lambeth must be obtained by written request, but is by no means difficult, yet no important spot in London is so rarely visited by the general public. The enthusiasm and intelligence of the resident guide, who has several times in the last ten years conducted the writer through its historic precincts, makes an hour at Lambeth a memorable lesson in English history. His huge gray cat, whose name, "Ma.s.sachusetts," in other years brought a smile to the lips of every American who chanced to learn it, no longer purrs a welcome to the dim corridors and towers of the old palace, but has gone the way of all his short-lived contemporaries. Let us hope that his master may for many years to come live to tell the long, romantic tale of these old walls to all of England's kin beyond the sea who journey hither to study with reverent eyes the history of the land from which they came.

Among places of minor interest in Southwark, which doubtless Milton well knew, was the "Tabard Inn," the starting-point of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims. This stood on High Street, and was not demolished until 1875. In Milton's time it was inscribed: "This is the Inne where Sir Jeffrey Chaucer and the nine and twenty pilgrims lay in their journey to Canterbury anno 1380." It had then a more modern facade than Chaucer saw.

The Globe Theatre of Shakespearian fame was then on the site of the present brewery of Barclay, Perkins, & Co. The visitor to the region just south of London Bridge who would see a bit of quaint domestic architecture that recalls the past, would do well to seek out, amid the noisy, hideous streets, a tiny green oasis, bordered by what is known as the Red Cross Hall and cottages. Thanks to Miss Octavia Hill and her friends, the little Gothic hall, with its frescoes of civic heroes, designed by Walter Crane, and its little row of picturesque gabled houses, stand here as a rest and solace to weary eyes and hearts that hunger amid ugliness for beauty. Just such houses Milton saw at every turn in the beautiful old London that he knew.

No church in Southwark and only two or three in London are of so great interest to the antiquarian as St. Saviour's or St. Mary Overy's, whose curious name is explained in every guide-book. It has a record of more than a thousand years. Chaucer, Cruden, the author of the "Concordance,"

Doctor Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Baxter, and Bunyan were closely connected with this church and parish. In one of its chapels, in the generation preceding Milton, beneath its three-light window, the Bishops of Winchester and London, and others acting for the see of Rome, tried and condemned to death by the flames seven ministers of Christ. Their only crime was opposition to the "usurpations of the Papal Schism." Among these were the rector of the church in which a half century later Milton was baptised, Bishop Hooper, who was burned at Gloucester, and John Rogers, the famous martyr of Smithfield. Another heretic, more fortunate than these seven, had just previously been condemned to the stake and pardoned for the sake of his musical talents. In this stately edifice, which has recently been admirably restored, lies the dust of many dear to lovers of poetry. Chaucer's fellow poet, friend, and teacher, John Gower, lies under a lofty Gothic canopy; his sculptured head rests on three large volumes, which represent his works. Milton's contemporaries, Ma.s.singer and Fletcher, lie buried in the same grave. The latter died of the plague when Milton was at Cambridge. His well-known poem on "Melancholy," beginning:

"Hence, all you vain delights, As short as are the nights Wherein you spend your folly!"

was probably familiar to the young poet at Horton, when he penned his "Il Penseroso," although Fletcher's poem was not published until after that.

Both Ma.s.singer and Fletcher are commemorated by modern windows. The latter's colleague, Francis Beaumont, whose writings are so indissolubly connected with his, is honoured with a window in which the friends.h.i.+p of the two is typified by the figures of David and Jonathan.

The year before Milton's birth, the author of "Hamlet" and "Lear"

doubtless stood within the choir of this church beside the grave of his young brother Edmond, an actor, who died at the age of twenty-seven, when his great elder brother's genius had nearly touched its zenith of creative power. The parish boasts that some of the most magnificent masterpieces of the world's literature were written within its borders by this, its most distinguished paris.h.i.+oner, and England's greatest son. In his youth Milton may well have attended the funeral of the great Bishop Andrewes, whose rec.u.mbent effigy is on one of the tombs that scholars will seek out. This man, who knew fifteen languages, was president of the little company of ten who gave the world a large part of the King James version of the Hebrew Scriptures, whose perfection of literary form has never been equalled. In the Lady-Chapel may still be seen inscribed upon the windows the virulent words which would not have as greatly offended Milton's taste as that of the present paris.h.i.+oners: "Your sacrament of the Ma.s.s is no sacrament at all, neither is Christ present in it;" "From the Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities, good Lord deliver us."

The London Bridge of Milton's day was one of England's marvels. Standing on the site of two or three predecessors, it stood 60 feet above high water and stretched 926 feet in length. It contained a drawbridge, and nineteen pointed arches, with ma.s.sive piers. Much of its picturesqueness must have resulted from the irregularity of the breadth of its arches.

The skilful chaplain who built it doubtless planned his spans according to the varying depth and strength of current of the tide, and would have scorned the modern mechanical habit of disregarding conditions in order to attain exact uniformity; thus his arches varied in breadth from ten to thirty-two feet. Over the tenth and longest was built a little Gothic chapel dedicated to the then new saint, Thomas of Canterbury. In Milton's lifetime, rows of houses were added to the chapel and stretched across toward the Southwark side.

Between the chapel and the southern end of the bridge was a drawbridge, and at the north end of this was a remarkable edifice of wood in Milton's boyhood. This was called "Nonsuch House." It was said to have been built in Holland and brought over in pieces and put together by wooden pegs. It stretched across the bridge upon an archway, and was a curious, fantastic structure, carved elaborately on three sides. The towers on its four corners bore high aloft above the neighbouring buildings low domes and gilded vanes. It stood upon the site of the old tower whereon the heads of criminals had been exposed; when it was taken down, the heads were removed to the tower over the gate upon the Southwark side. This had four circular turrets, and was a notable and imposing entrance to the bridge. At the north end of the bridge was an ingenious engine for raising water for the supply of the city. It was originally worked only by the tide flowing through the first arch; but for this work several of the water courses were later converted into waterfalls or rapids, and thereby greatly inconvenienced navigation. An extension of this simple, early mechanism lasted as late as 1822.

This bridge, which was to last six hundred and thirty years, was as long in building as King Solomon's Temple, and, at the time, probably surpa.s.sed in strength and size any bridge in the whole world.

London Bridge is famous the world over in the nurseries of every English-speaking child. Milton himself, as the fair-haired little darling in the scrivener's house on Bread Street, probably danced and sang the ancient ditty, as thousands had done before him:

"London bridge is broken down, Dance over, my Lady Lee; London bridge is broken down, With a gay ladee.

"How shall we build it up again?

Dance over, my Lady Lee; How shall we build it up again?

With a gay ladee.

"Build it up with stone so strong, Dance over, my Lady Lee; Huzza, 'twill last for ages long, With a gay ladee."

For centuries before Milton was born, Billingsgate, a little to the east of London Bridge, had been one of the city's water-gates, and long before his time its neighbourhood was filled with stalls for the sale of fish, a far more necessary commodity in days when no fresh meat was to be bought in winter. When Stow was preparing his "Survey," Billingsgate was "a large water-gate, port, or harbour for s.h.i.+ps and boats commonly arriving there with fish, both fresh and salt, sh.e.l.lfish, salt, oranges, onions, and other fruits and roots, wheat, rye, and grains of divers sorts."

CHAPTER XVII.

THE PLAGUE.--THE FIRE.--WREN.--LONDON REBUILT

In the summer of 1665, the Great Plague appeared in the midst of the alarm over the Dutch invasion. The three earlier visitations of the terrible disease during Milton's youth were to be eclipsed in horror by this, the last great one that England was to know. Little connection between dirt and disease existed in the minds of even scientific men. Dirt was condemned as unaesthetic; but that earth floors covered with rushes, mixed with greasy bones and decaying cabbage leaves, had any connection with the griping pain of the groaning child upon the cot, its father did not dream.

Some water was brought in pipes from Tyburn, but much of it was taken from the polluted Thames near London Bridge and carried about the streets in water-carts. How much was taken for bathing purposes may be imagined. When a luxurious monarch like Louis XIV. found a bath no necessity, we need not wonder that the English cartman, and blacksmith, and craftsman, housed in his narrow tenements near Smithfield or in Southwark, considered it a superfluity.

The summer of 1665 was hot and oppressive. All through the pitiless heat the wretched inmates of the town, whence two hundred thousand of the fortunate ones like Milton had fled, walked around the gloomy and deserted streets gathering their dead. By September fifteen hundred were dying every day. The heat was aggravated by the bonfires which were kept burning in vain hope of purifying the atmosphere. Physicians, ignorant, but heroic, remained at their posts, cupping and blistering, and uselessly tormenting the helpless folk who with pathetic confidence looked to them for salvation. Some men became insane, and some died of sheer fright. The suddenness of the death was one of the most ghastly features of the scourge. The mother who nursed her child at morning handed its little corpse at night to the man with the bell and dreadful cart, and knew not where its tender limbs were rudely thrust with the haste of a great terror which possessed the wretched gravediggers.

Out of a population of less than seven hundred thousand, probably one hundred thousand perished, and starvation and poverty stared many others in the face.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Erected in 1564-70 by Sir Thomas Gresham, and burned in the Great Fire in 1666.

_From an old engraving._]

Something must have been learned of the need of purer water, for we find London, after the fire next year, bestirring itself to get a general supply of water from a ca.n.a.l forty miles long, called "New River," which conducted a supply from Chadswell Springs in Hertfords.h.i.+re to a reservoir at Islington.

The summer of 1666 was likewise hot and dry, and a furious gale blew for weeks together. Conditions were the same as in Chicago before the conflagration that in November, 1871, swept over 1,687 acres, which covered a territory four miles long and nearly three miles wide, and entailed a loss of $300,000,000, though half of the buildings were of wood. The moment was as propitious for the fire fiend as when Mother O'Leary's cow kicked over the lamp in the Windy City of the West. A baker's oven took fire in Pudding Lane, two hundred and two feet from the site of the present Fire Monument, which Wren erected in memory of it that number of feet in height. The fire began on Sunday night. It was twenty-four hours before the dazed citizens attempted organised relief, but then it was too late. By Tuesday evening the flames had licked up everything as far west as the Temple. The resolute king came to the help of the inefficient mayor, and ordered gunpowder to be used to blow up buildings and thus create open s.p.a.ces where the fire would lack food. By Thursday evening the fire had practically ceased, and the citizens who had looked on at the destruction of their homes and churches and shops and the inestimable treasures of the past, sought shelter for their weary limbs.

No telegraphic messages of sympathy, no carloads of provisions from neighbouring cities poured in to their relief, and homeless children cried for bread.

Evelyn, in describing the conflagration, says: "All the skie was of a fiery aspect like that of a burning oven, and the light seen above forty miles round about for many nights. G.o.d grant mine eyes may never behold the sight--who now saw ten thousand houses all in one flame; the noise and crackling and thunder of the impetuous flames; the shrieking of women and children; the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses, and churches was like an hideous storme and the aire all about so hot and inflamed that at last one was not able to approach it. The clouds also and smoke were dismall and reached upon computation neere 56 miles in length. The poore inhabitants were dispers'd about St. George's Fields and Moorefields, as far as Highgate, and several miles in circle, some under tents, some under miserable hutts and hovells, many without a rag or any necessary utensils, bed or board, who from delicatenesse, riches, and easy accommodations in stately and well-furnished houses, were now reduc'd to extremest misery and poverty."

Pepys tells us that the entire lead roof of St. Paul's Cathedral, no less than six acres by measure, "fell in, the melted lead running down into the streets and into the crypt where books had been carried for safety." He notes that the fire burned just as many parish churches as there were hours from the beginning to the end of the fire.

Dryden, in the long section of his "Annus Mirabilis" which describes the "Great Fire," has a few lines among his prosaic stanzas which bear quotation:

"The ghosts of traitors from the bridge descend, With bold fanatic spectres to rejoice: About the fire into a dance they bend, And sing their sabbath notes with feeble voice.

"A key of fire ran all along the sh.o.r.e, And lightened all the river with a blaze: The wakened tides began again to roar, And wondering fish in s.h.i.+ning waters gaze.

"The rich grow suppliant, and the poor grow proud: Those offer mighty gain, and these ask more: So void of pity is the ign.o.ble crowd, When others' ruin may increase their store.

"The most in fields like herded beasts lie down, To dews obnoxious on the gra.s.sy floor; And while their babes in sleep their sorrows drown, Sad parents watch the remnants of their store."

The king, who for the time being had behaved in manly fas.h.i.+on, went back to his dalliance with courtesans and "the burning l.u.s.ts, dissolute court, profane and abominable lives" of which Evelyn writes on the day of fast and humiliation ordered for the occasion.

Though there was not a particle of proof that the Catholics had anything whatever to do with the origin of the fire, the frenzy and prejudice of the populace attributed it to them, and an inscription to that effect, which later was erased, was placed upon the monument.

The fire destroyed eighty-eight churches besides St. Paul's, together with the city gates, the Exchange, the Custom House, 13,200 dwelling-houses, and four hundred streets. A s.p.a.ce of 436 acres, two-thirds of the entire city, was consumed; and property then valued at 7,335,000 was destroyed.

For six months London remained a chaos of rubbish heaps. Pepys writes that in March he still saw smoke rising from the ruins. The eight churches in the city proper that still remain practically as Milton saw them have been described in detail. They are All Hallows Barking, St. Ethelburga's, St.

Andrew Undershaft, of Saxon foundation; St. Olave's, of Danish; and St.

Helen's, of Norman foundation; St. Catherine Cree, Austin Friars, which was the Dutch church, and St. Giles's, Cripplegate, just beside the city wall. Of the six others that were not destroyed, All Hallows by the wall (Broad Street Ward) and St. Katherine Coleman (Aldgate) were rebuilt later. The four that then remained but have since disappeared were St.

Christopher le Stocks, and St. Martin Outwich (Broad Street Ward), All-Hallows, Staining (Tower Ward), and St. Alphage, Aldermanbury.

Forty churches were rebuilt after the fire, and these were all designed by Sir Christopher Wren, who when he began his gigantic task was a young man of thirty-five. Wren, who was a nephew of the Bishop of Ely, was trained under Doctor Busby in Westminster School, and then at Wadham College, Oxford, and was there noted by John Evelyn as a "miracle of a youth," "a prodigious young scholar," who showed him "a thermometer, a monstrous magnet, and some dials."