would never be missed from South Kensington Museum, and you could see exactly how my Lord Howard lived when he entertained—and plotted against—his royal mistress three hundred years ago.
One does not like to think of the number of people who leave London without ever having seen the Charterhouse. It is one of the most beautiful places in all London, and its story is packed with romance, intrigue, adventure and benevolence.
The tale falls into three parts. It is begun by that gallant Hainaulter, Sir Walter de Manny, as the English called Walter, Lord of Mausny near Valenciennes, who came over to England in the train of Philippa of Hainault.
According to Froissart he was a “very gentil parfyte knighte,” and when he saw the ghastly heaps of dead bodies of plague-stricken people lying in the streets in 1349, he bought from St. Bartholomew’s Hospital a piece of land called No Man’s Land and caused the dead to be decently buried there. Their bodies at rest, he had thought for their souls, and on March 25, 1349, he laid the foundation-stone of a chapel where the relations might pray for their dead. Twenty years later Sir Walter Manny laid another stone, that of the first cell for the Carthusian monks he brought over from France. The wives and sisters of the dead had prayed so long in the chapel that the right could not be taken from them, so for once the strict Carthusian rule was relaxed and a special place was set apart for the womenkind to come and pray.
Sir Walter Manny died in 1372. He was buried at the foot of the step of the great altar in the chapel that may be seen to-day, and in the Charterhouse his Carthusian monks prayed according to the tenets of their faith for a hundred and sixty-five years more before the last prior, John Houghton, having been hung on Tyburn Tree, and many of the brothers tortured, the rest submitted to the king’s will. The House of the Salutation of the Mother of God in the Charterhouse near London was dissolved shortly afterwards.
The second phase of the Charterhouse story is a very different one. Twice during the following years it was prepared for the coming of a fair queen, whose head was bowed on Tower Hill instead of in the old chapel.
Charterhouse was granted to that wily old courtier, Sir Edward North, in 1545, and eight years later he “conveyed” it to John Dudley, Earl of Northumberland, the father-in-law of Lady Jane Grey. The Earl of Northumberland never wanted it for himself, as he had already Durham House in the Adelphi, but there was his son Guildford with his fair young wife to be lodged fittingly. So he brought up much furniture from Kenilworth and stored it hard by, little dreaming that his bold plans would miscarry and that he would die on Tower Hill a year before the children whose home he had planned shared the same fate.
North was granted the Charterhouse again by Queen Mary, and when Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558 she stayed six days there before her coronation.
Three years later she paid the old house another visit, but North died in 1564 and Charterhouse passed into the hands of crafty, brilliant, fickle Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk.