I have kept the best and most amazing of the treasures of Ely Place until the last.
Walk down the left-hand side of the square to the far corner, and you will find your way into one of the most beautiful things in London,—a thirteenth century chapel practically intact. It is so beautiful that if it were necessary to pay a high entrance fee or write for cards of admission, it would probably be the Mecca of every artist and antiquarian. But since it is in London, prodigal of such treasures, and anyone may walk in and look at its beauty undisturbed at any hour, St. Etheldreda’s Chapel is only known to a few people.
It was built in the last decade of the thirteenth century by a certain Bishop de Luda, as the chapel for Ely House, the town residence of the bishops of Ely.
John of Gaunt took refuge here and must have heard mass within these very walls. Shakespeare reminds us, in Richard II., of John of Gaunt’s death in Ely House, and it was in these cloisters that Henry VIII. first met with Cranmer. Queen Elizabeth’s chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton, worshipped here till his unlucky tenancy of Ely House was ended by his death in 1591, and so did his nephew’s imperious widow, the famous Lady Hatton who married and flouted Sir Edward Coke, the great lawyer and rival of Bacon for her hand.
It was at “Elie House in Holborne” in the reign of James I. that the last mystery play was represented in England, before the Spanish Ambassador Gondemar, who was a next-door neighbour to Ely Palace. The later history of the chapel may be briefly told. When the bishops finally sold the property to the Crown in 1772 and betook themselves to Dover Street, it was bought by an architect who preserved the chapel for the use of the residents of the houses he built in Ely Place. Afterwards it passed through several hands, being finally bought by the Fathers of Charity from the Welsh Episcopalians in 1871. When the work of restoration was finished, St. Etheldreda’s, the only pre-Reformation place of worship restored to the Roman Catholic Church, was reopened on St. Etheldreda’s Day, the 23rd of June, 1876.
St. Sepulchre’s
“Here lies one conquered that hath conquered kings.”
Epitaph to Capt. John Smith, 1631.
A little further along Holborn, in Giltspur Street, you come to the old Church of St. Sepulchre, where we meet again the Tyburn prisoners. Everybody who has heard the Beggar’s Opera (and who has not?) will remember the picture Polly Peachum draws of Macheath on the road to Tyburn: “Methinks I see him already in the cart, sweeter and more lovely than the nosegay in his hand.” It was at St. Sepulchre’s that the amorous highwayman would have got his nosegay, on the steps of the church, for an old benefactor had left money to provide flowers for every criminal going to be hanged. It was St. Sepulchre’s bell that tolled the hour of their hanging, and another legacy provided for an admonition and prayers for the condemned.
There are more cheerful memories connected with the old church. There is a mention of it in the twelfth century records. It was rebuilt in the middle of the fifteenth century—the south-west porch still remains a thing of beauty—and after it was nearly destroyed in the Great Fire in 1666, Wren practically rebuilt the church with its four weathercocks, whose differences of opinion about the wind gave rise to the saying of Howell: “Unreasonable people are as hard to reconcile as the vanes of St. Sepulchre’s tower.”
Two very noteworthy Elizabethans lie buried in St. Sepulchre’s, one a scholar, the other a brilliant adventurer. The former was Roger Ascham, the queen’s tutor, and the latter, Captain John Smith, “sometime Governor of Virginia and Admiral of New England,” of Pocahontas fame. Captain Smith’s adventures in America have rather overshadowed his earlier exploits. Mr. Walter Thornbury, in his wonderful Old and New London, tells that he fought in Hungary in 1602, and in three single combats overcame three Turks and cut off their heads, for which and other equally brave deeds Sigismund, Duke of Transylvania, gave him his picture set in gold with a pension of three hundred ducats, and allowed him to bear three Turks’ heads proper as his shield of arms. Pocahontas, who you remember found the English climate too much for her, lies buried in the parish church of St. George, Gravesend. In 1914 the Society of Virginian Dames placed two stained glass windows to honour her memory.