He had lived very little at the Charterhouse, and when it passed into the hands of his half-brother Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, the fortunes of the old house changed with the advent of the great English Admiral who could swear with truth “’Fore God I am no coward,” when he was admiral of the squadron at Flores in the Azores, “and the little Revenge ran on right into the heart of the foe.”
Lord Thomas Howard was one of the honoured, trusted servants of Elizabeth, and she came once more in 1603, not long before her death, to pay him a visit in the Charterhouse.
In a few months James I. came there, even as she had done, to spend the days before his coronation as the guest of the son of the man who had been his mother’s false suitor.
But brave Lord Thomas Howard was building a new house at Audley End, and needing money he sold Howard House for £13,000 to Sir Thomas Sutton. The brilliant days of the Charterhouse as a nobleman’s mansion were at an end—another chapter was concluded and the third phase of the story was to begin.
Sir Thomas Sutton, the new owner, was the Lord Rhondda of the sixteenth century. He was a Lincolnshire man with a wide knowledge of men and things, whose military profession never prevented his having a keen eye for business. He made a large fortune before he died in 1611, leaving the provision to found a hospital for eighty impoverished gentlemen and a school for forty boys, under the name of the Hospital of King James in Charterhouse.
There was much discussion, “about it and about,” before Sir Thomas Sutton’s chosen trustees could carry out his wishes. James I., true son of his father Darnley, had to be placated by a pourboire of £10,000, and even Bacon, jealous at not being among the trustees, tried to belittle the bequest and advise that the money should be used for his master’s benefit instead of for the poor. Sir Edward Coke, Lady Hatton’s husband, steered the hospital through the shoals that surrounded its launching and the more dangerous peril of the king’s genial idea that the Charterhouse revenues might fitly be used to pay for his army. The Charterhouse was founded, and for three hundred years the school has produced great Englishmen and the hospital harboured men who have found that in the evening of a working life the stars do not always appear.
Among the Charterhouse scholars have been the bearers of great names such as Lovelace and Crashaw, Addison and Steele, John Wesley, Sir Henry Havelock, Thackeray, Leech, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Lord Alverstone and many others. The school was removed in 1872 to Godalming, and the buildings were taken over by the Merchant Taylors’ Company for their boys’ school.
The hospital for the poor brothers no longer harbours eighty men. Their number is reduced to sixty owing to the depreciation in the value of Sir Thomas Sutton’s land and the fact that since the Charterhouse has always been considered a wealthy foundation no further bequests have ever been made to bring the number once more up to the four score of the founder’s intention.
That, briefly told, is the dramatic tale of the Charterhouse. You will readily believe it all if you take the District Railway to Aldersgate Street and go and see the Charterhouse for yourself. Its beauty is unimpaired by time. The Guesten Hall where the poor brethren take their meals, the great sixteenth century carved staircase, the chapel where Colonel Newcome sat, the false duke’s arcade, and the old gatehouse—all are there and many more things to recall the most dramatic pages of England’s history.