Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Saint Paul Part 2

CHAPTER II.

FROM THE ACCESSION OF DEAN COLET TO THE FIRE

(1505-1666).

With the Florentine studies of John Colet, remarks J.R. Green, a purer Christianity awoke throughout Teutonic Europe. Born in 1466, a son of a distinguished citizen who was twice Lord Mayor, after seven years at Oxford he travelled with sufficient means to France and Italy, and whether at home or abroad studied in particular Greek. "The knowledge of Greek seems to have had one almost exclusive end for him,"[21]

continues Green; "Greek was the key by which he could unlock the Gospels and the New Testament." Discarding the traditional mediaevalisms, his faith rested simply on a vivid realisation of the Person of Christ; and whilst his active and lucid intellect exhibit him in many lights, everything else was subordinate to his faith.

Returning to England, he lectured gratuitously at Oxford on St. Paul's Epistles, and formed a friends.h.i.+p with Erasmus. So Erasmus became the earnest pupil of an earnest master. Taking priests' orders, he was appointed Dean of St. Paul's and Prebendary of Mora (1505), and established a reputation as a preacher. In those days, and until Wolsey as legate gave the preference to Westminster, the two Houses held their sessions in the Chapter House and Nave of Old St. Paul's, as the opening ceremony still reminds us. Preaching at the opening in 1512, he startled Convocation by declaring, "All that is in the Church is either the l.u.s.t of the flesh, the l.u.s.t of the eyes, or the pride of life." In vain his bishop, Richard Fitz-James, endeavoured to establish a charge of heresy: the Primate Warham and young Henry VIII. both admired and supported the Dean; and the Dean continued to show his preference for the New Testament in the original Greek rather than for the prevalent nonsense of the mediaeval schoolmen.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DEAN COLET.

_After the portrait in Holland's "Heroologia," 1620._[22]]

Where the consent of his Chapter was necessary, Colet's efforts at reform were obstructed. The profanation of the sacred building he could not stop: buying, selling, and promenading in the nave continued the order of the day. The Chapter would have nothing to do with his new statutes, but elsewhere he was more successful. The Chancellor's School was not in accordance with his views; and in spite of Bishop, Chancellor, and Chapter, out of his own means he built ST. PAUL'S SCHOOL, towards the east end of the churchyard, and endowed it; and leaving his colleagues out in the cold, left the management to the Mercers' Company. His theology was manifest in the image over the gate. It was neither Erkenwald nor Unc.u.mber: it was not the Virgin or even St. Paul himself, but the Child Jesus with the simple and pregnant inscription, "Hear ye Him." The severity of his discipline, although a Pauline parent or pupil would now resent it, was adapted to those rough and hardy times, when people rose early and worked hard, and when corporal punishment was general and often, and irrespective of s.e.x or age. William Lyly, an Oxford student who had studied in the East, was his first high master. As the original St. Paul's School became eventually absorbed in Colet's, this latter--now removed from its old home to stately buildings on the Hammersmith Road, and possessing (1899), as a high master, a worthy successor of Lyly[23]--is in one sense a new foundation of Colet's, yet in another is also a continuation of that venerable foundation under the charge of the Chancellor. Looked at in this latter aspect, it may a.s.sert an antiquity almost as great as St. Peter's, York, which claims--and not without reason--to be the senior boys' school in the country. Colet so looked forward to the different requirements of different ages that his statutes did not tie his school down to any cut and dried course of study; but let us hope place will always be found for the Greek Testament. What are we to think of the preacher who, while denouncing war, so p.r.i.c.ked the conscience of Henry VIII. that the king sent to consult him? What of the Bible student who thought that the story of Creation was an allegory, and intended to teach the ignorant Israelites that the one G.o.d had created everybody and everything? What of the reformer who went beyond Erasmus in denouncing the profane excesses perpetrated in the name of religion at the shrine of Becket at Canterbury? Colet died of the "sweating sickness" at the early age of fifty-three, in 1519; and it is idle to speculate on his action had he lived until the breach with Rome. His monument in the south aisle of the choir perished in the Fire; and in the new Renaissance cathedral a second might well be erected to the memory of this great leader of the Renaissance in theology and learning, the greatest among many great occupants of the Dean's stall.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TOMB OF JOHN COLET, D.D., DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S.

_After Hollar._]

=Reformation Principles Opposed.=--The still smouldering doctrines of Wycliffe were now fanned into a flame; and Wolsey endeavoured to extinguish them without having resort to the stake Tyndal's New Testament, translated into English in 1526 at Worms, must have been speedily smuggled across the Channel. On the Shrove Tuesday of 1527 Wolsey attended St. Paul's, accompanied by some six-and-thirty prelates, mitred abbots, and other high dignitaries. Barnes of Cambridge, formerly a friar, and five others, "Stillyard men," were brought from the Fleet prison in penitential array, Barnes carrying a heavy taper, the rest f.a.ggots. Testaments and other forbidden books were in baskets by a fire in the nave. On their knees the penitents recanted; while Barnes declared that he deserved to be burnt. Fisher again preached; and the six pardoned offenders were taken inside the rails and made to walk round the fire, after which the books were burnt--by no means a solitary literary conflagration.

=Reformation Principles Advanced.=--In order to raise money, Henry declared that as the clergy had acquiesced in the authority of Wolsey as legate, and as such acquiescence was contrary to the Statute of Provisors, all these benefices were forfeit to the Crown, and a heavy subsidy must be paid as ransom. The clergy of the diocese of London, considering that the arch-offender against this Statute was Henry himself, and next to him the prelates and great mitred abbots, attended a meeting at the Chapter House, and were a.s.sisted by a number of their paris.h.i.+oners. John Stokesley, Bishop designate,[24] who presided, and who had to see the a.s.sessment made, could neither keep order nor gain his point: "We never meddled, let the bishops and abbots pay." Fifteen priests and four paris.h.i.+oners were imprisoned, and, of course, Henry gained his point.

Throughout 1534 the deanery was vacant. The Bishop was directed to see that the appointed preachers at Paul's Cross taught that the Pope had no spiritual authority of divine right. Here as elsewhere it is remarkable with what ease and unanimity the papal jurisdiction based on the Petrine claims was done away with. No dignitary--and Bonner that year became Prebendary of Chiswick--no priest of humbler rank connected with the cathedral, either resigned or got into trouble on this important doctrinal question; although the execution of those two earnest men, John Fisher and Thomas More, who opposed the divorce and the abrogation of the papal claims, was followed by a p.r.o.nouncement of excommunication, deposition, and an interdict on the part of Paul III.

Yet at St. Paul's, nineteen Anabaptists--a sect whom no one pitied--were sentenced to be burnt, and of these a man and a woman suffered at Smithfield, and the remainder in the provinces. The next year (1536) Hugh Latimer, as earnest and good a bishop as Fisher and his exact opposite, preaching before Convocation, denounced abuses in the spirit of an age which did not hesitate to call a spade a spade.

"Lift up your heads, brethren, and look about with your eyes; spy what things are to be reformed in the Church of England."

But more dramatic and more effective than the sonorous ring of honest Hugh's eloquence, was the sermon at the Cross (February 14, 1538) of Bishop John Hisley, Fisher's successor at Rochester, and formerly Prior of the Dominicans in London. His subject was an ingenious piece of mechanism, called the Rood of Grace, from Boxley in his diocese, a source of revenue from devotees. Now, this product of the mechanic's art does not seem to have had any resemblance to a Rood--_i.e._, a large cross or crucifix--but rather was shaped like a big doll; and Hisley demonstrated to his intelligent congregation of citizens how no inherent power, but a man standing inside, with the aid of wires, caused the rood to bow, and move its eyes and mouth.[25]

The exposure was followed next St. Bartholomew's eve by the removal of the Great Rood at the north door, and those of our Lady of Grace and of St. Unc.u.mber. This last saint is supposed to be a foreign princess of early times, styled also in England St. Wilgeforte. A peck of oats was a favourite offering at her shrine in St. Paul's by those who wished for favours; and according to Sir Thomas More she owed her popular name because wives unhappy in their union so offered in the hope that she would _unc.u.mber_ (_i.e._, disenc.u.mber) them of their husbands. The disgrace of Thomas Cromwell put a temporary stop to actions of this nature; and we find Gardiner at the Cross denouncing both Rome and Luther. We further find Barnes, our quondam penitent, amongst those who replied from the same famous pulpit, and likening himself and Gardiner to two fighting c.o.c.ks, only that the _garden_ c.o.c.k lacked good spurs. The result was that Barnes ended his chequered career at the stake, as did others.

=Edward VI.=--So long as Henry lived it was dangerous to uphold either the Petrine claims or the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and it was equally dangerous to oppose the doctrine of transubstantiation; but the Council of the child king would not have this latter doctrine, and was distinctly Protestant. The endowments of the chantries had been transferred to the Court of Augmentations in the autumn of 1545 (37 Henry VIII. c. 4) for the benefit of the king; but when at the beginning of 1547 Edward succeeded his father, St. Paul's still enjoyed her own. Somerset and his Protestant council not only wanted the property, but objected to ma.s.ses for the dead, and a renewing Act was quickly pa.s.sed, Edward's name taking his father's place. So went chantries and _obits_ into the royal coffers, the list in Dugdale, as returned to the Court, filling ten folio pages; while but little commiseration was felt for the hard lot of these illiterate chaplains deprived of their livelihood. And this was not all. Besides any remaining roods and crucifixes, altars were demolished, tombs wrecked, plate, jewels, vestments and frontals sold. Elaborate gold and silver embroidered work found its way to Spanish cathedrals, and up to a short time ago was reported to be still there.[26] Pardon Haugh Chapel was desecrated, and the bones carted away to Finsbury; the Chapter House cloisters went to build Somerset House. The dean, William May, was an advanced Protestant; but so was not his bishop, Bonner. Bonner preached at the Cross upholding transubstantiation, and was deprived and imprisoned. It is to the credit of his successor, Ridley, that he supported Bonner's mother and sister at Fulham; "Our mother Bonner"--he was unmarried--taking the head of his table. Yet Ridley was one of the judges at St. Paul's who sent the Anabaptist woman Joan Bucher to the stake for heresy. During the first year or two of this reign, complains Dean Milman, "Sunday after Sunday the Cathedral was thronged, not with decent and respectable citizens, but with a noisy rabble, many of them boys, to hear unseemly harangues on that solemn rite" [the Sacrament].

Ridley, after his translation (1550) restored comparative order, and remained bishop long enough to witness the introduction of the Second Prayer Book.

=Mary Tudor.=--When poor Edward came to his untimely end, Ridley sided with the faction of Jane, and preached at the Cross, declaring both Mary and Elizabeth illegitimate. For this he has been much censured; but so far as the two princesses went--of course this would not make Jane next of kin--he was but upholding the decisions of Ecclesiastical Courts. In spite of any weakness in her t.i.tle--and we have seen how her mother had been married to Arthur at St. Paul's--Mary was proclaimed, the bells rung, the Lords went in procession to hear _Te Deum_ chanted; Bonner went back, and Dean May was replaced by John f.e.c.kenham. Yet Mary's party by no means had everything their own way.

Gilbert Bourne, Prebendary of Wedland, who had retained his benefice throughout the late reign and was now Chaplain to the Queen, preaching at the Cross, was rudely interrupted with cries and throwing up of caps; and had it not been for two of his brother canons, John Rogers of St. Pancras and John Bradford of Cantlers, and others, who conducted him in safety to the adjacent schoolroom, matters might have gone ill with Mary's champion. Gardiner recanted his former heterodoxy concerning the papal supremacy in a sermon; and Pole appeared as Legate. Ridley, Rogers, and Bradford were amongst those who suffered at the stake, while May escaped.

Of course the old services were reintroduced; and we turn from grave to gay in a record of one of these revived functions. A doe was offered on the Conversion and a buck on the Commemoration of St. Paul, both in connection with some quaint old-world land tenure. Our records tell us that Bonner wore his mitre, and the Chapter their copes, with garlands of roses on their heads. The buck--it was the Commemoration--was brought to the high altar, and at some time and place not exactly defined but within the choir, was slain; and the head, severed and raised on a pole, was borne before the processional cross to the west door. Here a horn was blown, and other horns in different parts of the City answered.[27]

=Elizabeth.=--After the death of Mary, as the diocese of London had been the chief sufferer from the persecutions, and as the excitement in the City ran very high, the sermons at the Cross were for a time wisely discontinued. The Primate Pole, the last Romanist at Canterbury and the last Legate openly accredited to an English sovereign, and many of his suffragans likewise, died about the same time; and it was left for Bonner to preside over a thin Upper House.

What was to be done with the bishop? To allow him to continue in his high office was tantamount to a grave scandal to religion, and his person was not safe from the fury of the populace. He was replaced by Edmund Grindal, and spent the remaining ten years of his life chiefly in the security of the Marshalsea, without any undue vigour or harshness. Mary's first dean, f.e.c.kenham, had been made abbot of the resuscitated regular foundation of Westminster, and his successor was quietly ejected in favour of the restored May, whilst a few of the other dignitaries lost their stalls. The Epistle and Gospel were first read in English, and eventually the Prayer Book was resumed; but the changes were made gradually; and, considering the provocation, no vindictive spirit was displayed.

In June, 1561, the beautiful spire was destroyed by fire caused by lightning or by a plumber's neglect, and the Chapter House seriously injured. We have no trustworthy plates prior to this fire, and the various estimates about the height of the spire and other matters are anything but infallible. Service was held at St. Gregory's, and the roof and other parts restored at a cost of 6,700, but the architecture was never the same afterwards. Of course the disappointed Romanists attributed the disaster to the Divine anger, and Bishop Pilkington, of Durham, preaching next Sunday at the Cross, to the still continued desecration.

It is difficult for us to understand why this desecration was allowed to go on. A pillory was indeed set up outside near the bishop's palace, and a man convicted of fighting nailed there by his ears, which were afterwards cut off; but this must have been an offence exceptionally outrageous. "What swearing is there," says Dekker, "what shouldering, what jostling, what jeering, what biting of thumbs to beget quarrels." At Bishop Bancroft's Visitation a verger complained that colliers with coal-sacks, butchers' men with meat, and others made the interior a short cut. Bishop Corbet, of Norwich, wrote:

"When I past Paules, and travelled in that Walke Where all our Brittaine-sinners sweare and talke, Ould Harry-ruffians, bankrupts, suthe-sayers, And youth, whose cousenage is as ould as theirs."

The choir boys even during service time were on the alert for "spur money," a fine due for the wearing of spurs. "Paul's Walk" (the central aisle of the nave), said Bishop Earle, of Salisbury, "is the land's epitome.... It is the general mart of all famous lies."

Shakespeare was thinking of his own time, as well as of the time of Henry IV. (2 Henry IV., act 1, scene 2) when he makes Falstaff engage Bardolph, out of place and standing at the servant-men's pillow to be hired. John Evelyn called the cathedral a den of thieves. Before, we have mentioned that this abuse existed in mediaeval times; the above authorities show that it still went on right up to the Fire. Doctrine might be purified, and rites reformed; Paul's Walk was neither purified nor reformed.

John Felton nailed the Bull of Pius V. excommunicating and deposing Elizabeth (_Regnans in Excelsis_) to the bishop's gate at night (May 15, 1570), and was hung on a gallows hard by. We pa.s.s on from this, and from Elizabeth's "tuning of the pulpit" and various other matters, to the Armada. By September some of the captured flags were displayed on high outside, and waved over the preacher at the Cross. The last Sunday in November was appointed for the State Thanksgiving, Aylmer being bishop and Nowell dean. The Queen was driven in a chariot drawn by four white horses. Bishop John Piers, of Salisbury, the Almoner, was the preacher. His sermon has not come down, but the Form of Prayer has--"Turning the destruction they intended against us upon their own head." At the conclusion, the Queen remained in the City to dine with the bishop.

After the death of the great Queen, the leading conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot[28] were executed outside the West Front. John King, Dean of Christ Church, styled by James "the _king_ of preachers," was consecrated bishop in 1611; and the next year Bartholomew Leggatt was condemned as a heretic in the Consistory Court, and burnt at Smithfield; and a month later Edward Wightman suffered a like fate at Lichfield. But the Marian persecutions had made all good citizens sick of such sights, and henceforth, says Fuller, the king yielding to public opinion, "politically preferred that heretics, though condemned, should silently and privately waste themselves away in prison."

=Inigo Jones.=--A certain Master John Farley agitated in favour of the decaying and neglected fabric, and King James attended service in state to hear his favourite preacher, the bishop, plead for restoration from an appropriate text chosen by the king himself (March 26, 1620). After the service came a banquet at the bishop's palace, and after the banquet a meeting; and a Royal Commission was appointed before the end of the year on which the Lord Mayor was the first person named. Amongst other commissioners was Inigo Jones, Surveyor of the Royal Works. He had studied in Italy and was an enthusiastic student of the Italian Renaissance. Unfortunately the public was anything but enthusiastic, and only a small sum was contributed, which went in the purchase of stone. Matters came to a complete standstill; and shortly prior to his a.s.sa.s.sination the elder Villiers is reported to have stolen part of the stone for a watergate for his new town house.

[Ill.u.s.tration: INIGO JONES' PORTICO.

_After Hollar._]

The Commission died with the king, and Laud, becoming bishop, persuaded Charles to issue a new one. This time a handsome sum was collected, and work was commenced. As regards the exterior, the nave and west sides of the two transepts were cased throughout, and some repairs made to the east end.[29] The chief alteration in the interior was the adornment and restoration of the choir screen, at the expense of Sir Paul Pindar, and with the laudable object of putting an end to desecration. Inigo Jones added a n.o.ble cla.s.sical portico to the West End as a successor to Paul's Walk. We forgive the lack of harmony with the Norman nave, when we recall the truly religious motive.

But evil days for the cathedral were approaching. In the House of Commons (February 11, 1629), Oliver Cromwell, Member for Huntingdon town, made his maiden speech in a Grand Committee on Religion. He complained that Dr. Alablaster had preached flat Popery at Paul's Cross, and that the Doctor's bishop, Neile of Winchester, would not have it otherwise.[30] Alablaster was High Church, and the Third Parliament of Charles was not.

=The Civil War.=--The outbreak of the Civil War put an end to the Commission, and the moneys were confiscated.[31] The Long Parliament acquired the supremacy in the City, and from 1643 Inigo Jones ceased to act as surveyor, dying before the Restoration. The whole staff was expelled, and their revenues sequestrated; and Dr. Cornelius Burgess was appointed preacher, some of the more eastern bays of the choir being walled in by a brick part.i.tion as his chapel or conventicle. The chief fault to be found with Burgess is that he was out of place in a cathedral, otherwise there is much to be said in his favour. Even in those times, when religious fanaticism went mad, he behaved with discretion, and courageously headed the pet.i.tion of London ministers against the execution of the king. Hugh Peters figures in the crypt, and other parts were a.s.signed as meeting-houses. It is better to pa.s.s over as quickly as may be the behaviour of the soldiery and populace.

"Paul's Cathedral," says Carlyle, "is now a Horseguard; horses stamp in the Canons' stalls there [but the choir was mainly reserved for Burgess and his sermons], and Paul's Cross itself, as smacking of Popery ... was swept altogether away, and its leaden roof melted into bullets, or mixed with tin for culinary pewter."[32] Its very name, the Cross, was against it; and thus fell, never to be restored, the most famous pulpit in England, which through successive generations had been part and parcel of English history. Carlyle also tell us that Trooper Lockyer, of Whalley's Horse, "of excellent parts and much beloved," was shot in the churchyard for mutiny, "amid the tears of men and women."[33]

Monuments which had escaped earlier vandals were now defaced and destroyed; the scaffolding was seized; part of the roof on the south side fell in, and the lead was used for water-pipes. The new portico was hacked about and turned into stalls for wares, and, in a word, Inigo Jones' work more than undone. Other doings of the soldiery are unfit for publication.[34]

=The Restoration.=--Juxon was translated to Canterbury, and the munificent and much-abused Gilbert Sheldon received London, only in turn to succeed Juxon again three years later. At the beginning of the Civil War the deanery had become vacant, and Richard Steward designated for the vacancy. It was an empty appointment, and was afterwards changed for another of a like kind, and Matthew Nicolas became nominally dean. This preferment took actual effect from the summer of 1660, when Nicolas was installed dean and prebendary of Caddington Major, such of the other dignitaries as survived resuming their stalls, and vacancies were filled up. Another bay was added to the Burgess conventicle, and the cathedral services were resumed. But the sad condition of the fabric called for action, and in 1663 another Commission was appointed, and CHRISTOPHER WREN appointed surveyor. Taking example from his uncle's cathedral at Ely, he suggested an enlargement of the area at the junction of the four members of the cross, and subscriptions were raised.

=The Plague.=--There is a gap in the subscription list after March, 1665: the pestilence was already at work. As the summer advanced its ravages were intensified; and the City, fortunate in escaping earlier attacks, suffered so severely that the pest-houses proved insufficient; and Harrison Ainsworth is responsible for a story which may probably be depended on in its main outlines. The Lord Mayor and City authorities, in conjunction with the College of Physicians, obtained the consent of Dean Sancroft (the second from Nicolas) and his chapter for the conversion of the cathedral into a lazar-house; and a meeting was held in the Chapter House, at which the Primate Sheldon was present. Sheldon employed himself, co-operating with the Lord Mayor, in making provision for the victims. "Chapels and shrines," says Ainsworth, "formerly adorned with rich sculptures and costly ornaments, but stripped of them at times when they were looked upon as idolatrous and profane, were now occupied by nurses, chirurgeons and their attendants; while every niche and corner was filled with surgical instruments, phials, drugs, poultices, foul rags and linen."[35] After its chequered career, Old St. Paul's was destined to be used last of all as a hospital.

=The Fire.=--The house and Navy office of Samuel Pepys were in Seething Lane, Crutched Friars, near where Fenchurch Street Station now is. About three in the morning of Sunday, September 2, 1666, Samuel and his wife were called by their servant Jane, who told them of a fire visible in the south-west towards London Bridge. After looking out, not thinking it a great matter, the couple returned to bed; but getting up at seven Pepys heard a far worse account, and instead of attending morning service went to the Tower, and called on his neighbour Sir John Robinson, the Lieutenant. Robinson told him that the house of Faryner, baker to the king, in Pudding Lane had just caught fire, that Fish Street was in flames, and the church of St.

Magnus destroyed. These were near the north end of London Bridge, as the Monument and St. Magnus both remind us.

The origin of the Fire Pepys learnt later (February 24, 1667).

Faryner's people had occasion to light a candle at midnight; they went as usual into their bakehouse to light it, but as the fire had gone out, had to seek elsewhere. This striking a light in an unusual place by Faryner, his son and daughter, is a.s.serted to have been, somehow and all unknown to them, the origin of the Fire. "Which is," says Pepys, "a strange thing, that so horrid an effect should have so mean and uncertain a beginning." About two in the morning, when the family were upstairs and asleep again, the choking sensation of smoke woke them up, just in time to escape and tell the tale.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. PAUL'S IN FLAMES.

_Originally engraved by Hollar for the t.i.tle of Dean (afterwards Archbishop) Sancroft's sermon on the Great Fire._]

There was a drought, and the flames spread on their mission of devastation, a.s.sisted by a breeze. St. Paul's and most of the hundred City churches were not likely to be used for wors.h.i.+p that morning. "To see the churches all filling with goods by people who themselves should have been quietly there at the time." But service was held as usual at the Abbey; and just about sermon time, a newly elected king's scholar, Taswell, noticing a stir and commotion--he was standing by the pulpit steps--ascertained the cause. The news had spread that the City was in flames. Like most boys the prospect of something exciting coincided with his desire to escape a long sermon, so he hastened outside in time to see four boats on the river, the occupants of which had escaped in blankets. Let us hope that as he was not fully admitted, he escaped Busby's birch. All through the Sunday St. Paul's was safe--the distance from Pudding Lane was a little over half a mile--and even the east end of Lombard Street was intact. The paris.h.i.+oners of St. Gregory and St. Faith, lulled into a false sense of security, remained confident that even though the conflagration spread westward, and the surrounding houses caught fire, the flames would not leap across the vacant s.p.a.ce of churchyard; and the booksellers accordingly began to store their goods in St. Faith's as though the crypt were a fireproof safe.[36] So it might possibly have been, and in spite of sparks, had the distracted Lord Mayor been firm enough to prevent the storing of books in the churchyard, and had the cathedral roof been in good repair. The flames gradually encircled the churchyard; the goods there took fire, and the flames caught the end of a board placed on the roof to keep out the wet. The Nemesis of neglect!

Our young friend Taswell first saw the flame at eight o'clock on the Tuesday evening at Westminster. It broke out at the top of St. Paul's Church, almost scorched up by the violent heat of the air and lightning too, and before nine blazed so conspicuous "as to enable me to read very clearly a 16mo. edition of Terence, which I carried in my pocket."

Pepys corroborates as to the day "Paul's is burned and all Cheapside,"

writing of Tuesday, September 4th; and under the same date, Evelyn adds: "The stones of St. Paul's flew like grenades, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with a fiery redness, so as no horse or man was able to tread on them, _and the demolition had stopped all the pa.s.sages, so that no help could be applied_, the eastern wind still more impetuously driving the flames forward." By Wednesday night the central section of the City was so burnt out that Pepys walked through Cheapside and Newgate market. "It is a strange thing," he remarks, "to see how long the time did look since Sunday." "Sad sight," he adds next day, "to see how the river looks: no houses nor church near it." Friday, the 7th, early: "A miserable sight of Paul's Church with all the roofs fallen in, and the body of the quire fallen into St. Fayth's; Paul's School also, Ludgate and Fleet Street."

We will conclude this with some more extracts from the evidence of Pepys. On the next Sunday, when it is interesting to observe the drought came to an end, he attended service twice, probably at St.

Olave's, Hart Street, Mark Lane, in the neighbourhood of Crutched Friars. In the morning "Our parson made a melancholy but good sermon; and many and most in the church cried, specially the women. The church mighty full; but few of fas.h.i.+on, and most strangers. To church again, and there preached Dean Harding [Nicolas Hardy, of Rochester]; but methinks a bad, poor sermon, though proper for the time; nor eloquent in saying at this time that the City is reduced from a large folio to a decimo-tertio." The phrase "most strangers" is not surprising, as besides St. Paul's, some eighty-five parish churches were in ashes, including two without the walls but inside the Liberties. Our last extract is under date 12th November following, and ill.u.s.trates how such remains as had hitherto escaped desecration were treated in the general disorder. Bishop Braybroke's efforts at reform have been already acknowledged: his tomb was behind the high altar towards the east. "In the Convocation House Yard [apparently the s.p.a.ce within the Chapter House Cloisters] did there see the body of Robert Braybroke, Bishop of London, that died in 1404. He fell down in the tomb out of the great church into St. Fayth's this late fire, and is here seen his skeleton with the flesh on; but all tough and dry like a spongy dry leather or touchwood, all upon his bones. His head turned aside. A great man in his time, and Lord Chancellor. And now exposed to be handled and derided by some, though admired for its duration by others. Many flocking to see it."

Old St. Paul's, then, suffered the fate of its predecessors in the first week of September, 1666. By the Friday the conflagration had so far exhausted itself that Pepys was able to walk from Paul's Wharf to the churchyard. The City within the Walls was well-nigh burnt out, and of the eighty-three parish churches consumed only forty-eight were rebuilt; and these with the thirteen untouched left accommodation more than sufficient for the surrounding population. Our regret for the cathedral would have been greater, had this magnificent monument of mediaeval genius--probably of its kind as fine as any in the world--been capable of a conservative restoration: it is to be feared that neglect, the destroyer, and the restorer had amongst them rendered this task well-nigh impossible.

So far as existing authorities guide us, it remains to describe the architecture.[37]