IX
But the stirring history of the Minster itself was not yet completed, for the final chapter in a long record of events was not enacted until the early years of the nineteenth century.
The roads in the neighbourhood of York on February 2, 1829, were thronged with excited crowds hurrying to the city. Dashing through them came the fire-engines of Leeds, and others from Escrick Park. Far ahead, a great column of smoke hovered in the cold February sky. York Minster was on fire.
It was no accident that had caused this conflagration, but the wild imaginings of one Jonathan Martin, which had prompted him to become the incendiary of that stately pile. A singular character, compacted of the unlovely characteristics of Mawworm and the demented prophet, Solomon Eagle, this was the crowning act of a life distinguished by religious mania. Jonathan Martin was born at Hexham in 1782, and apprenticed to a tanner. His parents were poor, and he had only the slightest kind of education. At the expiration of his apprenticeship he found himself in London, and was speedily entrapped by the press-gang and sent to serve his Majesty as an able seaman. It seems to have been at this period that the unbalanced state of his mind first became noticeable. He was with the fleet at many places, and often in action, from Copenhagen to the Nile. At times he would exhibit cowardice, and at others either indifference to danger or actual bravery. He would be religious, dissolute, industrious, idle, sulky, or cheerful by turns: a pretended dreamer of dreams and communicant with angels. “Parson Saxe,” his shipmates named him; “but,” said one, years afterwards, “I always thought him more rogue than fool.”
Martin was paid off in 1810. He settled to work for a farmer at Norton, near Durham, and shortly afterwards married. He became a member of the Wesleyan Methodist body at Norton, and began those religious exercises which he claims to have converted him and to have emancipated him from the law, being “justified by faith” only. How dangerous such views of personal irresponsibility can be when held by the weak-minded his after-career was only too plainly to show. He immediately conceived an abhorrence of the Church of England, as a church teaching obedience to pastors and masters, and of the clergy for their worldliness. In this last respect, indeed, Martin—as we think now—had no little justification, for the Church had not then begun to arise from the almost Pagan slough of laziness, indifference, and greed of wealth and good living which throughout the previous century had marked the members of the Establishment, from the country parson up to the archbishops. When clergymen could find it in them to perform the solemn rite of the burial service while in a state of drunkenness; when, under Martin’s own observation at Durham, the Prince-Bishop of that city enjoyed emoluments and perquisites amounting to £30,000 per annum, there is little cause for surprise that hatred and contempt of the cloth should arise.
This basis of justification, acting upon a mind already diseased, and not rendered more healthy by fasting and brooding over the Scriptures, resulted in his attempting to preach from church pulpits, in writing threatening letters to the clergy, and eventually to a silly threat to shoot the Bishop of Oxford when at Stockport. For this he was rightly confined in a lunatic asylum at Gateshead. Some months later he managed to escape, and after wandering about the country took service with his former employer at Norton, the magistrates consenting to his remaining at liberty. In 1822 he left for Darlington, where he lived until 1827. His wife had died while he was in the asylum, and in 1828, while engaged in hawking a pamphlet biography of himself at Boston, he made the acquaintance of a young woman of that town and married her. By this time his religious mania had grown worse, and when, on December 26, 1828, he and his wife journeyed to York, it would appear that he went there with the design of burning the Cathedral already half-formed. He haunted the building day by day, leaving denunciatory letters from time to time. One, discovered on the iron grille of the choir screen, exhorted the clergy to “repent and cry For marcey for know is the day of vangens and your Cumplet Destruction is at Hand for the Lord will not sufer you and the Deveal and your blind Hellish Docktren to dseve the works of His Hands no longer. . . . Depart you Carsit blind Gides in to the Hotest plase of Hell to be tormentid with the Deveal and all his Eanguls for Ever and Ever.”
Violent language! but one may hear harangues very like it any day within Hyde Park, by the Marble Arch. There are many incendiaries in the making around us to-day, and as little attention is paid to them as to Martin’s ravings.
Undoubtedly mad, he possessed something of the madman’s cunning, and with the plan of firing the Cathedral fully formed, set out with his wife for Leeds, as he gave out, on the 27th of January. At Leeds he remained a few days, and was remarkable for his unusually quiet and orderly behaviour. He left on Saturday morning, ostensibly for Tadcaster, saying he should return on the Monday; but went instead to York. Here the madman’s cunning broke down, for he stayed at a place where he was well known; at the lodgings, in fact, that he had left a few days before. He prowled about the Cathedral the whole of the next day, Sunday, and attended service there, hiding behind a tomb in the north transept; overheard the notes of the organ—the finest in England—thundering and booming and rolling in echoes amid the fretted roofs. The sound troubled the brain of the maniac. “Buzz, buzz,” he whispered; “I’ll teach thee to stop thy buzzing,” and hid, shivering with religious and lunatic ecstasy, in the recess until the building was empty.
The short February day closed, and left the Cathedral in darkness; but he still waited. The ringers paid their evening-visit to the belfry, and he watched them from his hiding-place. He watched them go and then began his work. The ringers had left the belfry unlocked. Ascending to it, he cut a length of about a hundred feet off the prayer-bell rope, and, with his sailor’s handiness, made a rough ladder of it, by which to escape. Those were the days before lucifer matches. He had come provided with a razor, which he used as a steel; a flint, tinder, and a penny candle cut in two. Climbing, then, into the choir, he made two piles on the floor of prayer-books, curtains, hassocks, and cushions, and taking a candle from the altar, cut it up and distributed it between the two. Then, setting light to them, he set to work to escape. He had taken a pair of pincers from the shoemaker with whom he lodged, and breaking with them a window in the north transept, he hauled his rope through, and descended into the Minster Yard, soon after three o’clock in the morning.
The fire was not discovered until four hours later. By that time the stalls were half-consumed, and the vestry, where the communion plate was kept, was on fire. The plate was melted into an unrecognisable mass. By eight o’clock, despite the exertions of many willing helpers, the organ-screen was burnt, and the organ-pipes fell in thunder to the pavement, to the accompaniment of a furious shower of molten lead from the roof, which was now burning. The city fire-engines, those of the Cathedral, and others from Leeds and Escrick were all playing upon the conflagration that day, and the 7th Dragoon Guards and the Militia helped with a will, or kept back the vast crowds which had poured into the city from far and near. It was not until evening that the fire was quenched, and by that time the roof of the choir, over 130 feet in length, had been destroyed, and with it the stalls, the Bishop’s throne, and all the mediæval enrichments of that part of the building. Curiously enough, the great east window was but little damaged. The cost of this madman’s act was put at £100,000. A singular coincidence, greatly remarked upon at the time, was that on the Sunday following this disaster, one of the lessons for the day was the sixty-fourth chapter of Isaiah, the Church’s prayer to God, of which one verse at least was particularly applicable: “Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised Thee, is burned with fire; and all our pleasant things are laid waste.”
Martin was, in the first instance, connected with the outrage by the evidence of the shoemaker’s pincers he had left behind him. They were identified by his landlord. Meanwhile, the incendiary had fled along the Great North Road; first to Easingwold, thirteen miles away, where he drank a pint of ale; and then tramping on to Thirsk. Thence he hurried to Northallerton, arriving at three o’clock in the afternoon, worn out with thirty-three miles of walking. That night he journeyed in a coal-cart to West Auckland, and so eventually to a friend near Hexham, in whose house he was arrested on the 6th of February. Taken to York, he was tried at the sessions at York Castle on March 30th. The verdict, given on the following day, was “not guilty, on the ground of insanity,” and he was ordered to be kept in close custody during his Majesty’s pleasure. Martin was shortly afterwards removed from York Castle to St. Luke’s Hospital, London, in which he died in 1838. Two years later, the Minster was again on fire, this time as the result of an accident, and the western tower was burnt out.
Insanity in some degree ran through the Martin family. His brother John, who died in 1854, was a prominent artist, whose unbalanced mind did not give way, but led him to paint extraordinary pictures, chiefly of Scriptural interest and apocalyptic horrors. He was in his day considered a genius, and many of his terrific imaginations were engraved and must yet be familiar: such pictures as “Belshazzar’s Feast,” “The Eve of the Deluge,” “The Last Man,” and “The Plains of Heaven”: pictures well calculated to give children nightmares.