LICHFIELD.
We reached it after an hour's ride from Birmingham, arriving at 3 p. m. Valises deposited at a very homelike chateau, not far from the station, we were out for sights. Through a couple of short and narrow streets, where the brick buildings were painted in light colors, we passed into an opening dignified by the name of Square, measuring perhaps a hundred feet on each side. On the right-hand corner is an ancient Gothic church. On our left, making another corner, is the house in which, on the 18th of September, 1709, was born Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer, son of "Michael Johnson, bookseller and stationer, sometime magistrate of Lichfield," and who died, leaving his family in poverty. The house is three stories in height, with a hipped roof. It has nothing striking about it, and is forty feet or so square, of stone or brick, plastered on the outside, and painted cream-color. In the youth of Johnson, it contained a store, but has long since been remodelled, and the store is now the common room of the dwelling-house. The houses about it are closely built; no yard, garden, or tree is in sight.
In front, in the centre of the square, is a statue of Johnson, on a pedestal much too high. The statue is in a sitting posture, and looks too young for a man who did not come into public notoriety until much beyond the age represented by this sculpture. The unpretentious birthplace is more interesting than the monument. These streets, through which he so many times walked,—the church in which he so many times attended worship, and in which he was baptized,—these were too real not to make their impression. We could see the scrofulous boy of ten years, with his disfigured face and injured sight and hearing, his education already begun, and he a student of Latin at the Lichfield free school. He was five years there, then one at Stourbridge; and at the age of sixteen desired to enter Oxford, but was prevented by poverty. Going as assistant to one more fortunate in worldly affairs than himself, at length, in 1728, he was admitted to Pembroke, where, the record says, "he was disorderly, but not vicious." He died in London, Dec. 13, 1784. What incidents and great events go to make up his history for those intervening years! Wherever the English language is spoken it is influenced by his labors.
Not much antiquity is anywhere apparent in Lichfield. Take Johnson and the cathedral away, and there would be nothing of moment, for it has little business.
We soon arrive in the vicinity of the cathedral, and the scene changes as by magic.
The cathedral, with its centre and two western towers and spires, is of vast length and good height, built of a very red sandstone. It is about an eighth of a mile off, and well embowered with trees, with the river between us and them. The lower portions of the cathedral are hid from view. To the left, and not as far up, is another group of buildings, among them the Lichfield Museum.
On the second floor we find the place in charge of a matronly lady, who is at home in her work, and admirably fitted for the position. We look at old armor, at pictures, and relics "brought over the sea and from foreign parts," but better remains behind. In a glass case are exhibited things once owned and handled by the great writer who, next to the cathedral, gives Lichfield its interest and renown. Here are his silver shoe-buckles, the blue and white pint-mug from which he drank, the favorite saucer on which his wife Tetty used to put his morning breakfast biscuit; and here also are letters written by him. This was one of the especial treats of our tour.
We found the great cathedral in perfect repair. A small close surrounds it, with lawns, trees, and rooks. After a general look at it we take a turn along the river, and off to the rear and right of the cathedral, to walk around the promenade enclosing, like Chestnut Hill, the city reservoir.
Encircling the water, we come upon an exquisite little Gothic church and burial-ground. The area of the reservoir and its avenues is perhaps fifty acres,—the size of Boston Common,—and as one stands on the rear avenue, facing the town, the scene is most enchanting. The place is surrounded by a mixed landscape, in which fine trees abound; at the extreme left is the village, seen partially through the trees. On the right is the cathedral, nearly hid by the trees. Along the entire line are fields, gardens, and mansion-houses; and, behind all, are high lands, extending towards us, and around back of the little gem of a church. Behind us are aristocratic residences with intensely rural surroundings. On to our left, and behind, is the venerable St. John's Church, whose bell is plaintively tolling for evening prayers. From this to the town are brick buildings, and homes with their little gardens. When other scenes are forgotten, this evening in Lichfield will be as charming as now. Johnson would have been even more uncouth, but for the good influence of scenes like this; and his early removal hence deprived him of visions of daily and educating beauty.
In these churches—in St. Michael's near his home—he worshipped, and seeds were planted which in after life bore their pious fruit. He was not wholly rough in nature, nor entirely given to a love of literary gossip and coffee-house ease. Not solely inclined to entertainment by Garrick or Boswell, he loved the clergy as well, for he was a deeply religious man in his own way.
The cathedral is 400 feet long, 187 feet wide at the transepts, and has three spires,—the central 353 feet high, and the others, at the west end, 183 feet each. The western front is the best in England. No cathedral suffered more, in the destruction of its monuments at the time of the Reformation, than this. With the exception of the stone effigies of two prelates, and a few others of less importance, all were destroyed. There are, however, monuments of later date. One of the most noted is that to Lady Mary Wortley Montague,—a figure in marble, with an inscription recording her agency in introducing into England inoculation for smallpox. She was a native of Lichfield, and Dr. Smollett says: "Her letters will be an important monument to her memory, and will show, as long as the English language endures, the sprightliness of her wit, the solidity of her judgment, and the excellence of her real character."
The bust of Dr. Johnson was placed in the cathedral, as the inscription states, as "a tribute of respect to the memory of a man of extensive learning, a distinguished moral writer, and a sincere Christian." Near by is a cenotaph erected by Mrs. Garrick to the memory of her husband, the eminent dramatist and actor, who was the pupil and friend of Johnson, and died at London, Jan. 20, 1779.
The bishops of this cathedral have been men of especial note. Among them may be named Bishop Schrope, who was translated from this See to that of York, and was celebrated for his resistance to the usurpations of Henry IV., in consequence of which he was beheaded in 1405, and was long revered as a martyr.
Rowland Lee was appointed bishop of Lichfield in 1534. He solemnized the marriage of Henry VIII. with Anne Boleyn, in the nunnery of Sopewell, near St. Alban's. During the establishment of the reformed religion he was mortified to see his cathedral at Coventry entirely destroyed, notwithstanding his earnest endeavors to save it.
Ralph Bayne was one of the foremost persecutors of Queen Mary's reign, and caused women to be burnt at the stake. On the accession of Elizabeth to the throne, he refused to administer the sacrament to her, for which refusal an act of parliament deprived him of his See.
William Lloyd was one of the seven bishops committed to the Tower by James II., for refusing to read the Declaration of Liberty of Conscience, as it was called; although the real intention of it was to undermine the Protestant religion, and to set up popery again in its place.
John Hough, who was made bishop of this See in 1699, was, at the time of the Reformation, Master of Magdalen College at Oxford, and in like manner resisted the royal order. He was elected head of the college against the king's will, and so was forcibly ejected by the commissioners; but he was restored the next year.
One of the most memorable of all the bishops is Hackett, who came here in 1661. It was he who did so much in the way of restorations, after the destructive work of Cromwell, who dealt roughly with the Lichfield Cathedral. All churches, as well as abbeys, monasteries, and priories, were Roman Catholic institutions, and they suffered greatly in the suppression of papal worship. Statuary was destroyed, no matter what its value. Pictures and frescoes were defaced, altars torn down, and everything reduced to Cromwell's ideas of a Protestant level. This involved the destruction of a vast number of shrines and monuments, those of bishops and prelates suffering especial desecration. The iconoclasm was thorough. Roofs were taken off, buildings dismantled, and their rebuilding or occupancy prohibited under severe penalties. This accounts for the many fine ruins in Great Britain; Melrose Abbey, Furness Abbey, and a thousand others, are now in decay in consequence of these desecrations.
We deplore the loss of works of art and antiquity, but we must not judge from a nineteenth-century and American standpoint. Had papist institutions been left where for centuries they had been entrenched, Protestantism could have made little headway. People of low intellect, with its accompanying ignorance and superstition, are best reached through the senses. Pageants, images, pictures, devout genuflections, were powerful then as now. The authorities of the Roman Church knew this as they now know it. The new Protestant government of England realized that these religious emblems were great obstacles in its way, and was uncompromising in their extermination. The next generation, coming up under a new administration, was more tractable. This was unavoidable, if the rulers would prevent friction in the new machinery. Let us not speak ill of the bridge that carried freedom and toleration safely over.
This cathedral was for various causes an object of hostility. The adjacent green was fortified, and was alternately in possession of each party; and of course the cathedral suffered the injuries of a constant siege. History has it that two thousand cannon-shot and fifteen hundred hand-grenades were discharged against it. The central spire was battered down, and the others shared nearly the same fate. The statuary of the west front, around these towers, was shattered; the painted windows were broken; the monuments were mutilated; and the mural stones were stripped of their brasses. Dugdale says:—
It was greatly profaned by Cromwell's soldiers, who hunted a cat every day in it with hounds, and delighted themselves with the echo of their sport along the vaulted roofs. Nor was this all; they profaned it still further by bringing a calf into it, wrapt in linen, which they carried to the font, and there sprinkled it with water, and gave it a name in scorn and derision of the holy sacrament.
When Bishop Hackett was appointed to the See in 1661 he found the cathedral in this hopeless confusion; but, in spite of such discouraging conditions, on the very morning after his arrival he prepared for improvements. With laudable zeal he aroused his servants early, set his coach-horses, with teams and laborers, to removing the rubbish, and himself laid the first hand to the work. A subscription soon amounted to $45,000, of which the bishop contributed $10,000. The dean and chapter contributed a like sum; and the remainder was raised by the bishop, who solicited aid from every nobleman and gentleman in the diocese, and of almost every stranger who visited the cathedral. He obtained from Charles II. a grant of one hundred timber-trees out of Needwood Forest, and in eight years saw his cathedral perfectly restored. With joy and great solemnity it was re-consecrated Dec. 24, 1669.
The next year Bishop Hackett contracted for six bells, only one of which was hung in his lifetime. His biographer Plume says:—
During his last illness he went out of his bed-chamber into the next room to hear it; seemed well pleased with the sound, blessed God who had favored him in life to hear it, and observed at the same time that it was his "own passing-bell." He then retired to his chamber, and never left it again till he was carried to his grave.
That bell still sounds from the tower. The same decorations present themselves, and by these the good bishop yet speaketh. Unfortunate are the visitors who, amid scenes and sounds like these, having eyes, see not, and having ears, do not hear.
The war history of one cathedral is the history of all, for each was desecrated, and each has had some Bishop Hackett; though not every restorer was as capable as he in purse and brain. Restorations were everywhere begun, and in many instances the new work exceeded the old; but superstition and ignorance were common even among the high clergy, and oppression accompanied their daily life, as it did that of our New England ancestry.
At 10.20 a. m. of Thursday, May 30, we left for that peculiarly named town, Stoke-upon-Trent.