Stray Studies from England and Italy

by John Richard Greene

"I found the windows so broken, and the chapel lay so nastily," he wrote long after in his Defence, "that I was ashamed to behold, and could not resort unto it but with some disdain." With characteristic energy the Archbishop aided with his own hands in the repair of the windows, and racked his wits "in making up the history of those old broken pictures by help of the fragments of them, which I compared with the story." In the east window his glazier was scandalized at being forced by the Primate's express directions to "repair and new make the broken crucifix." The holy table was set altar-wise against the wall, and a cloth of arras hung behind it embroidered with the history of the Last Supper. The elaborate woodwork of the screen, the richly-embroidered copes of the chaplains, the silver candlesticks, the credence-table, the organ and the choir, the genuflexions to the altar, recalled the elaborate ceremonial of the Royal Chapel.

High-handed however as the Archbishop's course had been, he felt dimly the approaching wreck. At the close of 1639 he notes in his diary a great storm that broke even the boats of the Lambeth watermen to pieces as they lay before his gate. A curious instance of his gloomy prognostications still exists among the relics in the library—a quarry of greenish glass, once belonging to the west window of the gallery of Croydon, and removed when that palace was rebuilt. On the quarry Laud has written with his signet-ring in his own clear, beautiful hand, "Memorand. Ecclesiæ de Micham, Cheme, et Stone cum aliis fulgure combustæ sunt. Januar. 14, 1638-9. Omen avertat Deus."

The omen was far from averted. The Scottish war, the Bellum Episcopale, the Bishops' War, as men called it, was soon going against the King. Laud had been the chief mover in the war, and it was against Laud that the popular indignation at once directed itself. On the 9th of May he notes in his diary: "A paper posted upon the Royal Exchange, animating 'prentices to sack my house on the Monday following." On that Monday night the mob came surging up to the gates. "At midnight my house was beset with 500 of these rascal routers," notes the indomitable little prelate. He had received notice in time to secure the house, and after two hours of useless shouting the mob rolled away. Laud had his revenge; a drummer who had joined in the attack was racked mercilessly, and then hanged and quartered. But retaliation like this was useless. The gathering of the Long Parliament sounded the knell of the sturdy little minister who had ridden England so hard. At the close of October he is in his upper study—it is one of the pleasant scholarly touches that redeem so much in his life—"to see some manuscripts which I was sending to Oxford. In that study hung my picture taken by the life" (the picture is at Lambeth still), "and coming in I found it fallen down upon the face and lying on the floor, the string being broken by which it was hanged against the wall. I am almost everyday threatened with my ruin in parliament. God grant this be no omen." On the 18th of December he was in charge of the gentleman-usher of the Lords on impeachment of high treason. In his company the Archbishop returned for a few hours to see his house for the last time, "for a book or two to read in, and such papers as pertained to my defence against the Scots;" really to burn, says Prynne, most of his privy papers. There is the first little break in the boldness with which till now he has faced the popular ill-will, the first little break too of tenderness, as though the shadow of what was to come were softening him, in the words that tell us his last farewell: "I stayed at Lambeth till the evening, to avoid the gaze of the people. I went to evening prayer in my chapel. The Psalms of the day (Ps. 93 and 94) and cap. 50 of Isaiah gave me great comfort. God make me worthy of it, and fit to receive it. As I went to my barge hundreds of my poor neighbours stood there and prayed for my safety and return to my house. For which I bless God and them."

So Laud vanished into the dark December night never to return. The house seems to have been left unmolested for two years. Then "Captain Browne and his company entered my house at Lambeth to keep it for public service." The troopers burst open the door "and offered violence to the organ," but it was saved for the time by the intervention of their captain. In 1643 the zeal of the soldiers could no longer be restrained. Even in the solitude and terror of his prison in the Tower Laud still feels the bitterness of the last blow at the house he held so dear. "May 1. My chapel windows defaced and the steps torn up." But the crowning bitterness was to come. If there were two men living who had personal wrongs to avenge on the Archbishop, they were Leighton and Prynne. It can only have been as a personal triumph over their humbled persecutor that the Parliament appointed the first custodian of Lambeth and gave Prynne the charge of searching the Archbishop's house and chambers for materials in support of the impeachment. Of the spirit in which Prynne executed his task, the famous 'Canterburie's Doom,' with the Breviat of Laud's life which preceded it, still gives pungent evidence. By one of those curious coincidences that sometimes flash the fact upon us through the dust of old libraries, the copy of this violent invective preserved at Lambeth is inscribed on its fly-leaf with the clear, bold "Dum spiro spero, C.R." of the King himself. It is hard to picture the thoughts that must have passed through Charles's mind as he read the bitter triumphant pages that told how the man he had twice pilloried and then flung into prison for life had come out again, as he puts it brutally, to "unkennel that fox," his foe.

Not even the Archbishop's study with its array of Missals and Breviaries and Books of Hours, not even the gallery with its "superstitious pictures," the three Italian masterpieces that he hurried as evidence to the bar of the House of Lords, so revealed to this terrible detective "the rotten, idolatrous heart" of the Primate as the sight of the chapel. It was soon reduced to simplicity. We have seen how sharply even in prison Laud felt the havoc made by the soldiery. But worse profanation was to follow. In 1648 the house passed by sale to the regicide Colonel Scott; the Great Hall was at once demolished, and the chapel turned into the dining-room of the household. The tomb of Parker was levelled with the ground; and if we are to believe the story of the royalists, the new owner felt so keenly the discomfort of dining over a dead man's bones that the remains of the great Protestant primate were disinterred and buried anew in an adjoining field.

The story of the library is a more certain one. From the days of Bancroft to those of Laud it had remained secure in the rooms over the great cloister where Parker's collection had probably stood before it passed to Cambridge. There in Parker's day Foxe had busied himself in work for the later editions of his 'Acts and Monuments;' even in the present library one book at least bears his autograph and the marginal marks of his use. There the great scholars of the seventeenth century, with Selden among them, had carried on their labours. The time was now come when Selden was to save the library from destruction. At the sale of Lambeth the Parliament ordered the books and manuscripts to be sold with the house. Selden dexterously interposed. The will of its founder, Bancroft, he pleaded, directed that in case room should not be found for it at Lambeth his gift should go to Cambridge; and the Parliament, convinced by its greatest scholar, suffered the books to be sent to the University.

When the Restoration brought the Stuart home again, it flung Scott into the Tower and set Juxon in the ruined, desecrated walls. Of the deeper thoughts that such a scene might have suggested few probably found their way into the simple, limited mind of the new primate. The whole pathos of Juxon's position lay in fact in his perfect absorption in the past. The books were reclaimed from their Cambridge Adullam. The chapel was rescued from desecration, and the fine woodwork of screen and stalls replaced as Laud had left them. The demolition of the hall left him a more serious labour, and the way in which he entered on it brought strikingly out Juxon's temper. He knew that he had but a few years to live, and he set himself but one work to do before he died, the replacing everything in the state in which the storm of the rebellion had found it. He resolved therefore not only to rebuild the hall but to rebuild it precisely as it had stood before it was destroyed. It was in vain that he was besieged by the remonstrances of "classical" architects, that he was sneered at even by Pepys as "old-fashioned"; times had changed and fashions had changed, but Juxon would recognize no change at all. He died ere the building was finished, but even in death his inflexible will provided that his plans should be adhered to. The result has been a singularly happy one. It was not merely that the Archbishop has left us one of the noblest examples of that strange yet successful revival of Gothic feeling of which the staircase of Christ Church Hall, erected at much about the same time, furnishes so exquisite a specimen. It is that in his tenacity to the past he has preserved the historic interest of his hall. Beneath the picturesque woodwork of the roof, in the quiet light that breaks through the quaint mullions of its windows, the student may still recall without a jar the figures which make Lambeth memorable, figures such as those of Warham and Erasmus, of Grocyn and Colet and More. Unhappily there was a darker side to this conservatism. The Archbishops had returned like the Bourbons, forgetting nothing and having learned hardly anything. If any man could have learned the lesson of history it was Juxon's successor, the hard sceptical Sheldon, and one of the jottings in Pepys' Diary shows us what sort of lesson he had learned. Pepys had gone down the river at noon to dine with the Archbishop in company with Sir Christopher Wren, "the first time," as he notes, "that I ever was there, and I have long longed for it." Only a few days before he had had a terrible disappointment, for "Mr. Wren and I took boat, thinking to dine with my Lord of Canterbury, but when we came to Lambeth the gate was shut, which is strictly done at twelve o'clock, and nobody comes in afterwards, so we lost our labour." On this occasion Pepys was more fortunate. He found "a noble house and well furnished with good pictures and furniture, and noble attendance in good order, and a great deal of company, though an ordinary day, and exceeding good cheer, nowhere better or so much that ever I think I saw." Sheldon with his usual courtesy gave his visitors kindly welcome, and Pepys was preparing to withdraw at the close of dinner when he heard news which induced him to remain. The almost incredible scene that followed must be told in his own words:—"Most of the company gone, and I going, I heard by a gentleman of a sermon that was to be there; and so I stayed to hear it, thinking it to be serious, till by-and-by the gentleman told me it was a mockery by one Cornet Bolton, a very gentlemanlike man, that behind a chair did pray and preach like a Presbyter Scot, with all the possible imitation in grimaces and voice. And his text about the hanging up their harps upon the willows; and a serious, good sermon too, exclaiming against bishops and crying up of my good Lord Eglington till it made us all burst. But I did wonder to hear the Bishop at this time to make himself sport with things of this kind; but I perceive it was shown to him as a rarity, and he took care to have the room door shut; but there were about twenty gentlemen there, infinitely pleased with the 'novelty.'"

It was "novelties" like these that led the last of the Stuarts to his fatal belief that he could safely defy a Church that had so severed itself from the English religion in doing the work of the Crown. The pen of a great historian has told for all time the Trial of the Seven Bishops, and though their protest was drawn up at Lambeth I may not venture to tell it here. Of all the seven in fact Sancroft was probably the least inclined to resistance, the one prelate to whom the cheers of the great multitude at their acquittal brought least sense of triumph.

No sooner indeed was James driven from the throne than the Primate fell back into the servile king-worship of an England that was passing away. Within the closed gates of Lambeth he debated endlessly with himself and with his fellow-bishops the questions of "de jure" and "de facto" right to the crown. Every day he sheered further and further from the actual world around him. Newton, who was with him at Lambeth when it was announced that the Convention had declared the throne vacant, found that Sancroft's thoughts were not with England or English freedom—they were concentrated on the question whether James's child were a supposititious one or no. "He wished," he said, "they had gone on a more regular method and examined into the birth of the young child. There was reason," he added, "to believe he was not the same as the first, which might easily be known, for he had a mole on his neck." The new Government bore long with the old man, and Bancroft for a time seems really to have wavered. He suffered his chaplains to take the oaths and then scolded them bitterly for praying for William and Mary. He declined to take his seat at the Council board, and yet issued his commission for the consecration of Burnet. At last his mind was made up and the Government on his final refusal to take the oath of allegiance had no alternative but to declare the see vacant.

For six months Bancroft was still suffered to remain in his house, though Tillotson was nominated as his successor. With a perfect courtesy, worthy of the saintly temper which was his characteristic, Tillotson waited long at the deprived Archbishop's door desiring a conference. But Sancroft refused to see him. Evelyn found the old man in a dismantled house, bitter at his fall. "Say 'nolo,' and say it from the heart," he had replied passionately to Beveridge when he sought his counsel on the offer of a bishopric. Others asked whether after refusing the oaths they might attend worship where the new sovereigns were prayed for. "If they do," answered Sancroft, "they will need the Absolution at the end as well as at the beginning of the service." In the answer lay the schism of the Nonjurors, and to this schism Sancroft soon gave definite form. On Whitsunday the new Church was started in the archiepiscopal Chapel. The throng of visitors was kept standing at the palace gate. No one was admitted to the Chapel but some fifty who had refused the oaths. The Archbishop himself consecrated: one Nonjuror reading the prayers, another preaching. A formal action of ejectment was the answer to this open defiance, and on the evening of its decision in favour of the Crown Sancroft withdrew quietly by boat over Thames to the Temple. He was soon followed by many who, amidst the pettiness of his public views, could still realize the grandeur of his self-devotion. To one, the Earl of Aylesbury, the Archbishop himself opened the door. His visitor, struck with the change of all he saw from the pomp of Lambeth, burst into tears and owned how deeply the sight affected him. "O my good lord," replied Sancroft, "rather rejoice with me, for now I live again."