Milton's England Part 9

One grave within the church may have been dear to Milton besides that of his honoured father. As he lived only one generation removed from the martyrs of Smithfield, he must often have pored over the record of their heroism and cruel deaths, by Fox, the famous martyrologist. Near the west door lies the slab above his grave. The date is 1587. Here, no doubt, Milton, who, as has been said, at different times had dwellings near the church, must often have entered within its doors and paused.

Says the historian Marsden: "Fox placed the Church of England under greater obligations than any writer of his time, and had his recompense in an old age of poverty and shame.... Nor were his writings undervalued even then; they were commanded to be chained up in churches by the side of the homilies and the English Bible;... thus the 'Book of Martyrs' stood amongst the high, authentic records of our Church, whilst its venerable author yet lived."

Frobisher, the great navigator, is also buried within the church.

On the left wall, as one faces the choir, is a curious doggerel inscription to one Busbie. If it be on a Sunday afternoon, and the children have gathered for the Sunday school, it may be interesting to pause a bit, as we have done, before the epitaph, and, while copying it, to lend a half ear to the teaching that goes on within hearing. Three small boys sit on a bench before a solemn youth who holds a book and instructs their infant minds as follows: "Who is G.o.d? Where is G.o.d? How many persons are there in the G.o.dhead? Keep still there--don't answer until it is your turn. When G.o.d put Adam and Eve out of Eden, what did he promise them?" "That they should be saved," mumbles one youngster. "Whom did he promise should save them?" "His Son." "What do we call his Son?"

"Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." The next cla.s.s and all the others scattered through the church are progressing in Christian nurture in much the same way, and one wonders whether the pedagogical skill of the teachers has advanced one whit in all the hundreds of years since the church was built. We hear no "opening exercises," no joyous singing, no tender, earnest talk about right-doing and the temptations that little boys on Fore Street may encounter on Monday morning. There is nothing but a purely formal catechising of these eager, impressionable little souls as to a theology that they cannot understand, and a history of the world which their first lesson on geology will undermine. This modern Sunday school is the one blot upon the memory of the beautiful old church so dear to every lover of Milton.

On a week day one may stand on Redcross Street, and behold, as did the travellers in "The Hand of Ethelberta," "the bold shape of the tower they sought, clothed in every neutral shade, standing clear against the sky, dusky and grim in its upper stages, and h.o.a.ry gray below, where every corner of stone was rounded off by the waves of wind and storm. All people were busy here; our visitors seemed to be the only idle persons that the city contained; and there was no dissonance--there never is--between antiquity and such beehive industry.... This intramural stir was a fly-wheel, transparent by infinite motion, through which Milton and his day could be seen as if nothing intervened."

CHAPTER XI.

GRESHAM COLLEGE.--AUSTIN FRIARS.--GUILDHALL--ST. MARY'S, ALDERMANBURY.--CHRIST'S HOSPITAL.--ST. SEPULCHRE'S

Through Milton's lifetime and for nearly a century after, there stood on Gresham Street and Basinghall Street the famous Gresham College, founded in 1579, in honour of Sir Thomas Gresham, who gave the Royal Exchange to the city on condition that the corporation should inst.i.tute lectures on divinity, civil law, astronomy, music, geometry, rhetoric, and physics, to be delivered at his residence. His dwelling-house was a s.p.a.cious edifice of brick and timber, "with open courts and covered walks which seemed all so well suited for such an intention, as if Sir Thomas had it in view, at the time he built his house." Seven professors were appointed and lectured in the morning in Latin, in the afternoon in English for two hours each day. Among the number was Sir Christopher Wren, who not only was the greatest architect, but, as is elsewhere said, was one of the famous astronomers of his day. It was out of his lectures on astronomy, which were attended by learned men, that the Royal Society originated. On Cromwell's death, all college matters were put in abeyance, and the college was temporarily turned into barracks, and so polluted that Bishop Sprat wrote to Wren that he "found the place in such a nasty condition, so defiled, and the smells so infernal, that if you should now come to make use of your tube [telescope] it would be like Dives looking out of h.e.l.l into heaven."

After the Fire, Gresham College was temporarily used for an Exchange, where merchants met. "Gresham College became an epitome of this great city, and the centre of all affairs, both public and private, which were then transacted in it."

Except "London stone" and bits of the Old Wall, little more remains to consider among the important landmarks of the city that was nightly locked within the city gates, and which still endures after the Great Fire. Of this little part, Austin Friars Church, on the site of the Augustinian Convent, is the most notable. Of the extensive and magnificent establishment that was founded here in 1253, nothing to-day remains but the nave of the great church of former days, which is now reached through narrow pa.s.sages from Old Broad Street north of the Bank. Originally the church was cruciform, with choir, transepts, and a "most fine, spired steeple, both small and straight." Henry VIII. at the Dissolution bestowed the house and grounds upon the first Marquis of Winchester, but the church was given by the young King Edward VI. "to the Dutch nation in London, to be their preaching place." From that day to this the Dutch have wors.h.i.+pped here, and in the days of persecution it was the religious home of other Continental refugees. In the generation before Milton, thousands of the skilled artisans of the Netherlands and France had fled to England, impoveris.h.i.+ng the lands of the short-sighted tyrants who drove them forth, to add to English industry and commerce. The most eminent pastor of these exiles was a Polish n.o.bleman, John a Lasco, who shepherded, not only this flock, but all the other foreigners in England, and superintended their schools as well. He was a friend of Melanchthon and Erasmus, was with the latter when he died, and became possessed of his library.

It was to these refugees in London, Norwich, and other towns that harboured them, that England owed the introduction of many new, choice flowers, among them, the gillyflower, carnation, Provence rose, and others. The handiwork of these industrious folk produced many new stuffs unknown to English ladies, among others the fine light fabric known as bombazine. One of the Dutch ladies, who taught the English to starch and launder cambric ruffs, was so much sought after and charged such high fees, that she soon earned herself a competence. Evidently these strangers paid their way.

The church a.s.signed to them in London once possessed a marvellous array of tombs of noted men. The register is crowded with the names of earls and barons, all of whose monuments were sold by the impecunious and callous marquis for 100. Just before Milton's birth the fourth Marquis of Winchester was compelled to part with all his possessions in Austin Friars. At about this time the tower, declared to be "one of the beautifullest and rarest spectacles" in the city, was pulled down, and the choir and transepts were demolished. The size of the original building may be imagined when we remember that the length of the nave alone is one hundred and fifty feet to-day. The chronicler records that in the beginning of the Dutch services, the church was filled to overflowing.

Whether there are fewer Dutch in London four centuries later, or fewer who are glad to wors.h.i.+p in their own tongue, cannot be said. But to-day, the visitor, who on a Sunday morning walks through the silent and deserted streets north of the Bank of England, and penetrates to the seclusion of Austin Friars Church, will find but a scant congregation of perhaps two hundred, who gather cosily within the curtains in the centre of the nave, which shut out the great bare aisles. If he thinks of the old days when Roger Williams taught Dutch to his learned pupil, John Milton, he may let his fancy picture to him these men, who ranked among the nation-builders of their day, stepping some Sunday morning under its Gothic arches from out the greensward that then surrounded them, and listening to the gospel in the tongue of those brave exiles who, like them, had fought for freedom of conscience.

If the visitor waits after service, he may see in the pastor's room the portrait of John a Lasco, to whom all the congregation point back with pride, as the first and greatest preacher in their history; and the courteous pastor may point out many things of interest that would escape the casual observer. Standing at the front of the church, beside the little tower at the left, whose beautiful spire no longer rises aloft, one finds himself in the heart of the modern business world, relentless, pus.h.i.+ng, loving neither beauty nor the sacredness of age. One sign--Barnato Brothers--may attract his attention in a window close to the gray church walls. Here the ambitious and ill-starred king of African mines, Barney Barnato, brought his power to bear upon the men on 'Change a decade since. A decade hence his name, like John a Lasco's, will be remembered by few. These names and the a.s.sociations they suggest are no unfitting theme for meditation on a Sunday morning stroll amid the stony streets of London past and present.

Further west, amid the district swept by the Great Fire, stands Guildhall, not as it stood either before or after the fire, but still worthy of mention in the category of buildings that withstood the flames. Only the roof perished in the fire, and its walls stood intact; but so great have been the changes since their restoration that very little which belonged to Milton's London remains above the crypt.

A clergyman, writing the year after the Great Fire, thus describes it, as he saw it during that terrible conflagration: "And amongst other things that night, the sight of Guildhall was a fearful spectacle, which stood the whole of it together, after the fire had taken it, without flames (I suppose because the timber was such solid oake), like a bright s.h.i.+ning wal, as if it had been a palace of gold, or a great building of burnished bra.s.s."

The present roof is as nearly as possible a reproduction of the one that perished in the fire: it is an open oak roof, and has a central louvre.

The figures of giants in its hall represent Gog and Magog, who were the Corineus and Gogmagog of the ancient city pageants. The former was a companion of Brutus, the Trojan, and according to tradition killed Gogmagog, the aboriginal giant.

The crypt is reputed to be the finest now remaining in London. It is a portion of the ancient hall of 1411. The north and south aisles had formerly mullioned windows, which are now walled up. The vaulting, with four centred arches, is notable, and is probably of the earliest of that type.

The Guildhall was founded in 1411, in the time of Henry IV., and when Milton was a boy had attained a certain venerableness. Within its walls had taken place, not merely the civic banquets for which its modern successor is noted, but also many tragic scenes in English history. Here the evil-minded Protector who wished to supplant his boy-nephew, Edward V., had his name presented to the a.s.sembled mult.i.tudes as the legitimate monarch, by his oily courtier, Buckingham. The people, "marvellously abashed," listened in dead silence, as the accomplished orator proclaimed the b.a.s.t.a.r.dy of the little prince, and urged the claims of his ambitious uncle. The speaker, somewhat disconcerted, explained again, louder and more explicitly, his meaning. "But were it for wonder or fear, or that each looked that other should speak first, not one word was there answered of all the people that stood before; but all were as still as the midnight." Then the recorder was summoned to use his efforts with the people. "But all this no change made in the people, which alway after stood as they were amazed." At last some servants of the duke, and 'prentices and lads "thrusted into the hall amongst the press," began suddenly to cry out aloud: "King Richard, King Richard," and "they that stood before cast back their heads marvelling thereat, but nothing they said. And when the duke and the mayor saw this manner, they wisely turned it to their purpose, and said it was a goodly cry and a joyful to hear every man _with one voice_, and no man saying nay." Thus a bold _coup_, struck with a masterful hand, surprised an honest people without organised opposition and leaders.h.i.+p, and as so many times in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race, the voice of a small and powerful minority was impudently declared to be _vox populi_.

One of the saddest sights that the Guildhall Milton knew ever witnessed was the trial, in the reign of Henry VIII., of that young lady, Anne Askew, whose courage and devotion never were surpa.s.sed within the Colosseum, among the Christians who fought with beasts or were sawn asunder. Having become a Protestant, she was driven by her husband, who was a papist, from his home. King Henry, it might have been supposed, would have at least taken no action against her, but she was arrested and examined. The lord mayor of London asked her whether the priest cannot make the body of Christ, to which she replied as shrewdly as Jeanne d'Arc to her inquisitors: "I have read that G.o.d made man; but that man can make G.o.d, I never yet read." She was condemned at Guildhall to death for heresy. A daughter of a knight, this delicate lady, reared in comfort, was carried to the Tower, thrust into a cell, where but for a few brave friends she would have starved, and then her tender body was put on the rack, and Chancellor Wriothesley himself applied such power as nearly rent it in sunder. The story of her cruel death amid the flames at Smithfield belongs rather to that b.l.o.o.d.y spot than to the Guildhall. Her life she could have saved, even at the last moment, had her heroic soul faltered, and unsaid what conscience taught. Those were tales to freeze the life from out young hearts, that grandames told in Milton's boyhood. To the men of his day, Guildhall stood chiefly connected with some of the most remarkable trials in England's history.

Among them was that of Throckmorton for complicity in Sir Thomas Wyatt's attempt against the Catholic Queen Mary. In those days, when trial usually meant speedy death, his acquittal, due to his own forensic skill and eloquence, is recounted in detail by historians as most remarkable. He it was whose tomb in St. Catherine Cree's is mentioned, and for whom a London street is named.

The church of St. Mary Aldermanbury is one that few visitors to London ever enter, but the follower in Milton's footsteps will not fail to seek out, a little west of the Guildhall, this church, whose registers record that here Milton, at the age of forty-eight, married his second wife, Katherine Woodc.o.c.ke. Aldermanbury derives its name from the ancient court or _bery_ of the aldermen, which is now held at the Guildhall. The church stands in its tiny green churchyard closely surrounded by business blocks, amidst the bustle of the city; on a summer noontide, in its shady retreat, the seats are filled with loiterers who chat or meditate or read their papers around the central monument.

This monument, though modern, is of great interest. It records the fact that J. Heminge and Henry Condell, Shakespeare's fellow actors and personal friends, lived many years in this parish, and are buried here.

Says the inscription: "To their disinterested affection the world owes all that it calls Shakespeare; they alone collected his dramatic writings, regardless of pecuniary loss, and without the hope of any profit gave them to the world.

"First Folio: 'We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead, without ambition of selfe-profit or fame, only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend alive, as was our Shakespeare.'

"Extract from Preface: 'It had been a thing, we confesse, worthie to have been wished, that the author himselfe had lived to have set forth and overseene his own writings, but since it hath been ordained otherwise,...

we pray you do not envy his Friends the office of their care and paine to have collected and published them, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them, who as he was a happy imitator of nature, was a most gentle expression of it. His mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered, with that easiness that wee have sca.r.s.e received from him a blot on his papers.'" In 1656 Milton's marriage took place in the earlier church, of very ancient foundation. The present building was designed by Wren, and was begun in 1668, during Milton's blindness. It has a square tower capped by a square bell turret about ninety feet in height.

The register of the church, which was preserved, records that: "The agreement and intention of marriage between John Milton, Esq., of the parish of Margaret's in Westminster, and Mrs. Katharine Woodc.o.c.ke of Mary's in Aldermanbury, was published three several market days in three several weeks ... and no exception being made against their intentions, they were according to the act of Parliament, married on the 12th of November, by Sir John Dethicke, Knight and Alderman, one of the Justices for the Peace in the City of London." A justice instead of a clergyman was prescribed by the Marriage Act which was then in force.

Judge Jeffreys of b.l.o.o.d.y memory is buried in the church (d. 1689).

A little west of it is Christ's Hospital, which, since its establishment in 1552 by the boy-king, Edward VI., until the summer of 1902, has been one of the most noted of London schools. Its revenue is about 60,000. Its removal to Horsham in the country will provide the ample playgrounds and modern accommodations that the times demand; but even an American, to say nothing of native Londoners, must feel a pang of regret at the disappearance from the street of the bright-eyed, bare-headed lads, whose quaint costume has for centuries given their school its name of "Blue Coat School." Anciently the boys wore caps, but now they go bare-headed through the year.

The school was originally established on the site of the Gray Friars Monastery, as a kind of asylum for poor children. Stow gives the following account of the opening of the inst.i.tution. "In the month of September they took in near four hundred orphans, and cloathed them in Russet, but ever after they wore Blue Cloath Coats, whence it is commonly called the Blue Coat Hospital. Their habit being now a long coat of blue warm cloth, close to their arms and Body, hanging loose to their Heels, girt about their Waist with a red leather girdle buckled, a round thrum Cap tyed with a red Band, Yellow Stockings, and Black Low-heeled Shoes, their hair cut close their Locks short."

"Their fare was Breakfast, bread and beer, 6.30 summer, 7.30 winter.

Sunday, beef and pottage for dinners. Suppers, as good legs and shoulders of mutton as can be bought. Tuesdays and Thursdays, same dinner as Sundays. Other days, no flesh--Monday, milk porridge; Wednesday, furmity; Friday, old peas and pottage; Sat.u.r.day, water-gruel. Rost beef, 12 times a year. Supper, bread and b.u.t.ter or bread and cheese; Wednesday and Friday, pudding pies."

This seems to have been a liberal table compared with that of the famous Winchester school in its early days, when two meals a day were all that were allowed, except for invalids.

Stow mentions that "the King granted all Church Linnen formerly used in the Churches of London" to the hospital, as a superabundance had been found. Girls as well as boys were lodged and taught here. Stow tells us of the custom which prevailed from his day to ours: "One boy being appointed, goeth up into a pulpit there placed and readeth a chapter ... and prayers.

At the end of every prayer all the boys cry 'Amen,' that maketh a very melodious sound. The boy that reads is designed for the university. A Psalm is named by the same boy; and all sing with a good organ that is placed in the said great Hall." He describes the grace said by one boy in the pulpit, and the boys and girls quietly seating themselves while "mult.i.tudes of city and court" came to witness it.

An ancient writer recounts the joy of the half-starved youngsters when they were first taken into its dining-hall and saw the baskets heaped with bread, and knew that there was enough for all. Among the buildings which are about to be replaced by mercantile establishments there is little, if anything, that Milton saw. Christ's Church, beside it, where Richard Baxter lies buried, was built by Wren a little after his time.

Where so many famous men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were to be numbered as students,--Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and others,--the one name on its register that would have most interested Milton was that of William Camden who studied here, as well as at St.

Paul's. A visitor from Boston, Ma.s.sachusetts, is interested to know that in 1626, one little lad in yellow stockings and dark blue coat, who studied Latin here to some purpose, was Ezekiel Cheever, who became the master of the Boston Latin School. For thirty years he taught the Yankee boys in the little wooden house on School Street at the foot of Beacon Hill, and made them learn his famous "Accidence," which went through many editions. Often as he wandered over the "rocky nook with hilltops three,"

where "twice each day the flowing sea took Boston in its arms," his thoughts must have turned back to the walled city with its spires and palaces and prisons which he and Milton knew when they were boys.

The London tourist, who visits London for the first time after 1902, will miss seeing one of its most fascinating sights, for he can never stand in the great dining-hall of Christ's Hospital on a Sunday noon and see the procession of pink-cheeked lads in their knee-breeches and long skirts come trooping in an orderly procession into the great hall, bearing great platters of steaming meats and baskets piled with rolls. The "Grecians"

and "Deputy-Grecians," and the less distinguished rank and file will never again pause here to listen to the Latin grace, nor will gaze at the huge canvas on the long wall between the galleries at either end. One wonders what will become of the old desks in the schoolroom, into which a score of generations of schoolboys have carved their names, and whether in their splendid new surroundings they will not look back half regretfully to the dim old cloisters which linked them with their great historic past.

Old Newgate was a foul prison in Milton's day. Here in filthy chambers, gentlemen like Ellwood, Defoe, and William Penn were thrown together with felons. Diagonally across the street from the huge grim prison of later days, which since 1770 has stretched its length along the thoroughfare which bears its name, is St. Sepulchre's Church. From its tower the knell was struck for executions at the neighbouring Newgate, and many a time must the boys in Christ's Hospital and the Charterhouse School north of it have listened in horrified curiosity as the bell tolled, and they knew it meant that a man, blindfolded and with bound hands, was standing on the scaffold in front of Newgate. St. Sepulchre's has been much altered since Milton entered it, perhaps in search of the same monument that first of all attracts Americans. This is the monument of that bold discoverer and coloniser, John Smith, who settled Jamestown in Virginia the year before Milton was born. Who knows but Milton may have met him, or have gazed upon the dark-eyed Princess Pocahontas, who left her native forests and became the bride of the Englishman Rolfe, after she had saved the life of the gallant Captain Smith.

His old tombstone is nearly defaced, and lies in the side aisle, some yards from its original site. A replica of the original inscription is placed on a bra.s.s tablet near it:

"Here lyes one conquered, who hath conquered kings; Subdued large territories and done things Which to the world impossible will seem But that the Truth is held in more esteem,...

Or shall I tell of his adventures since, Done in Virginia, that large Continente?

How that he subdued kings unto his yoke, And made those Heathen flee as wind doth smoke, And made their land, being of so large a Station, An habitation for our Christian nation."...

The above-mentioned "kings" were doubtless Indian sachems. The Anglo-Saxon satisfaction at the way the heathen were made to flee like smoke, and make room for a Christian nation, as shown by the writer of this effusion, indicates that the white Christian of Smith's day was not unlike his posterity three centuries later in the time of Cecil Rhodes and of Philippine campaigns.

John Rogers, the Smithfield martyr, was vicar of this church. During his residence in Antwerp, he had made the acquaintance of Tyndale, the translator of the Bible, and continued Tyndale's work after his death.

Dean Milman tells us: "There is no doubt that the first complete English Bible came from Antwerp under his superintendence and auspices. It bore then and still bears the name of Matthews's Bible. Of Matthews, however, no trace has ever been discovered. There is every reason for believing the untraceable Matthews was John Rogers. If so, Rogers was not only the protomartyr of the English Church, but, with due respect for Tyndale, the protomartyr of the English Bible."

Among the most eminent men buried at St. Sepulchre's was Roger Ascham, in 1568. Doubtless Milton, before writing his own remarkable treatise on education, must have studied the progressive theories of this man who taught Latin and Greek to Queen Elizabeth.