A little farther north, on Hart Street, once stood the richly decorated timber house, called “Whittington’s Palace.” According to doubtful tradition this was where the famous Dick Whittington, with princely magnanimity, burnt the royal bond for a debt of £60,000, when Henry V. and his queen came to dine with him. “Never had king such a subject,” Henry is reported to have said, when Whittington replied to the hero of Agincourt, “Surely, Sire, never had subject such a king.” This palace, with its whole front of diamond-paned windows, stood in Milton’s time.
Near by, on Hart Street, is the church of St. Olave, which with All Hallows, Barking, escaped the Great Fire, and stands as it stood in Milton’s life. The tourist must time his visit to it on a week day to the noon hour, as, unlike All Hallows, Barking, it is not open all day.
The monastery of the Crutched Friars must have covered in ancient days a large part of the parish of this church. Its dimensions are of the smallest—it is only fifty-four feet long. Its name takes us back to the times of the Danish settlement, for St. Olave is but the corruption of St. Olaf, the Norwegian saint who was the martyred king of the Northmen. The body of this saint rests in the great cathedral at Trondheim, Norway. His history is closely connected with the immediate region. As a boy of twelve he started on his career as viking; later he fought with Ethelred against the usurping Danes in London. The latter held the bridge which connected the walled town with low-lying Southwark across the Thames. The struggle waxed desperate, when the bold Norwegian at a critical juncture fastened cables to the bridge, and then ordered his little ships, which were attached to them, to row hard down stream. The piles tottered, the bridge, which swarmed with the Danes, fell, and those that were not drowned were driven away. When William the Conqueror sailed up the Thames a half century later, the stories of the intrepid Olaf, who had become Norway’s king and had died in battle, must have been fresh in mind.
Not only this church, but others in the city were erected in his name. The present structure was probably built about 1450, and was repaired about the time that Milton returned to London from Italy.
During the Reformation, in 1553, St. Olave’s had “a pair of organes.” During the Civil War in 1644, an ordinance was passed that all organs in churches “should be taken away and utterly defaced.” It is very certain that the music-loving Milton, who joyed to hear
“... the organ blow, to the full-voiced choir below”
must have mourned this stern decree. In consequence of this, most organ builders for sixteen years were obliged to work as carpenters and joiners.
The famous diarist, Pepys, who attended St. Olave’s, writes on June 17, 1660: “This day the organs did begin to play at Whitehall Chapel, where I heard very good musique, the first time that ever I remember to have heard the organs and singing men in surplices in my life.” On April 20, 1667, he records: “To Hackney Church, and found much difficulty to get pews. That which I went chiefly to see was the young ladies of the schools, whereof there is great store, very pretty, and also the organ, which is handsome, and tunes the psalms and plays with the people, which is mighty pretty, and makes me mighty earnest to have a pair at our church”—which meant St. Olave’s.
About the time of Pepys’s writing, a peal of six remarkably sweet-toned bells was placed in the tower. In the church are quaint brasses and monuments, the most interesting of which is the tomb of Pepys. An elegant monument of alabaster, with a bust of Pepys, taken from his portrait in the National Gallery, was unveiled in 1884. It bears the dates: “b. 1632, d. 1703.” The monument is near the door where Pepys used to enter the church from Seething Lane.
Pepys, like Milton, was educated at St. Paul’s School. His fame rests chiefly on his diary, which was written in cipher, and not deciphered and published until 1825. On the unveiling of his monument, James Russell Lowell, in his address, spoke of Pepys as “a type perhaps of what is now called a Philistine. We have no word in English which is equivalent to the French adjective ‘bourgeois,’ but at all events, Samuel Pepys was the most perfect type that ever existed of the class of people whom this word describes. He had all its merits, as well as many of its defects.” With all these defects, perhaps in spite of them, Lowell maintained, Pepys had written one of the most delightful books that it was man’s privilege to read in the English language, or in any other. There was no parallel to the character of Pepys in respect of naïveté unless it were found in that of Falstaff, and Pepys showed himself, too, “like Falstaff, on terms of unbuttoned familiarity with himself.... Pepys’s naïveté was the inoffensive vanity of a man who loved to see himself in the glass.” It was questionable, he said, whether Pepys could have had any sense of humour at all, and yet permitted himself to be so delightful. The lightest part of the diary was of value historically, for it enabled us to see the London of two hundred years ago, and, what was more, to see it with the eager eyes of Pepys. It was not Pepys the official, the clerk of the acts and secretary of the Admiralty, who had brought that large gathering together—it was Pepys the diarist.