You may look on the handwriting of “Jane the Quene,” in one of the very few documents signed by Lady Jane Grey during her nine days’ reign, or read the pathetic letter written by Mary Queen of Scots to Sir William Cecil, “Mester Cessilles,” she calls him in the queer Scottish-English sometimes used by “yowr richt asured good friend, Marie R.”
For here are guarded poignant souvenirs of long-dead men and women, of whose sorrows and anguish of mind nothing is left but the yellowing paper covered with the almost illegible writing of their times. You will find the cry of Sir Philip Sidney to Jaen Wyer the Court surgeon of His Highness of Cleves, written when he lay dying from his wound at the battle of Zutphen: “Come, my Weier, come. I am in danger of my life and I want you here. Neither living or dead shall I be ungrateful. I can write no more, but I earnestly pray you to make haste. Farewell. At Arnem. Yours, Ph. Sidney.” And Sir Walter Raleigh’s letter to Queen Anne, the wife of James the First, where he says: “My extreme shortness of breath doth grow fast on me, with the dispayre of obtayning so mich grace to walke with my keeper up the hill within the Tower.”
The letters are not all sorrowful, but they all have the power to breathe life into the dry bones of history. Not far from the heart-felt appeal of the great Cardinal Wolsey to Henry VIII., praying for “grace, mercy, remissyon and pardon,” and signed “Your Graces moste prostrat poor chapleyn, creature, and bedisman,” is a letter from ten-year-old William of Orange, quaint letters from Leicester and Essex to their fickle queen, and a dignified epistle, lamenting the outbreak of war between France and England, but renouncing his fealty and homage to Richard II., from a fourteenth century member of that noble Picardie family whose proud device was:
Roy ne suis,
ne prince ne duc,
ne comte aussy:
Je suis sire de Coucy.
Old letters are not the only treasures in this corner belonging to another age. There are beautiful fourteenth-century chests, a bulla carved by Benvenuto Cellini, that prince of goldsmiths and autobiographers, and indeed the greatest treasure of all, that I have kept till the last.
One first hears of the Domesday Book in the days when one has visions of a vast tome with some vague connection with the Day of Judgment. Not even Little Arthur could dispel the prodigious respect and awe one felt for it. I confused it with the book in which one’s manifold sins are recorded, and even mature age does not prevent a little secret satisfaction that has nothing historical at the sight of those fat, brown hundreds-of-years-old books that we owe to William the Conqueror’s Norman love for exact accounts.
The Domesday Books used to be kept in the Chapter House at Westminster and were only moved to the Record Office in 1839.
Nevill’s Court
“Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts.”—Dr. Johnson.
A stone’s throw from the east end of the Record Office is one of the most curious unnoticed corners of old London. Go up Fetter Lane, which is the next turning to Chancery Lane out of Fleet Street, and at No. 34, close to the Moravian Chapel, you will see a narrow passage called Nevill’s Court. This passage leads you straight into one of the oldest bits of London still existing, for here in the very heart of newspaper land are little ancient seventeenth-century houses with cottage gardens. They give one the same feeling of unexpectedness as those other queer little wooden houses with their high gables that you may see in Collingwood Street, just on the other side of Blackfriars Bridge (I think it is the third turning to the right). They stand beside the church, just as they stood nearly three hundred years ago, when the Thames washed right up to their doorsteps.