The visitor cannot but query, as he surveys the handsome monument erected to him by his wife, how this was paid for, but there are many explanations that suggest themselves.
Many a time may Milton as a boy and man have stood before this tomb, and viewed the fine timber roof and the late Perpendicular windows, which to-day remain just as he saw them. If the modern visitor would study the fashions of his day, he can do no better than inspect such monuments as the costly Hammersley erected here. The date thereon is 1636, when Milton was a young man of twenty-eight. The absence in the life-size kneeling figure of the huge stiff crinoline on the tombs of a little earlier date shows that the fashions changed as sharply as in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The date of the handsome organ is 1695.
CHAPTER X.
CROSBY HALL.—ST. HELEN’S.—ST. ETHELBURGA’S.—ST. GILES’S, CRIPPLEGATE
assing by the tiny churchyard of St. Andrew Undershaft, by several narrow and obscure passages amid crowded business blocks, one comes upon the famous Crosby Hall on Bishopsgate Street. This presents to-day one of the most picturesque examples of the beam and plaster houses of the fifteenth century to be found in England. It was, says Stow, “the highest at that time in London,” that is, about 1475. Doubtless his reference is to a high turret which once surmounted it, but of which no traces now remain. This was before the more pretentious Tudor buildings of the next century, of whose high towers Stow’s biographer says: “He could not endure the high turrets and buildings run up to a great height, which some citizens in his time laid out their money upon to overtop and overlook their neighbours. Such sort of advanced works, both towers and chimneys, they built both in their summerhouses in Moorfields and in other places in the suburbs, and in their dwelling houses in the City itself. They were like midsummer Pageants, ‘not so much for use and profit as for show and pleasure,’ ‘bewraying,’ said he, ‘the vanities of men’s minds. And that it was unlike to the disposition of the ancient citizens, who delighted in the building of hospitals and almshouses for the poor; and therein both employed their wits, and spent their wealth in the preferment of the common commodity of this our city.’”
Crosby House was, as Sir Thomas More relates, where Richard, Duke of Gloucester, “lodged himself, and little by little all folks drew unto him, so that the Protector’s court was crowded and King Edward’s left desolate.” Here he probably planned his treasonable and malicious scheme for the death of the little princes. In his play of “Richard III.,” Shakespeare mentions Crosby Hall more than once; doubtless he knew it well, for ten years before the birth of Milton it seems evident that he resided in a house hard by. It is quite certain that it is to his immortalising Crosby Hall that its preservation to this day is due, when almost everything else that was contemporaneous in secular architecture has disappeared in its vicinity.
The building has been much restored, and its banquet-hall is now utilised for a first-class restaurant, where he who will may dine where dukes and princes dined four centuries ago. Sir Thomas More lived here for several years, and here doubtless wrote his life of the base king, to the echo of whose voice these walls had once resounded. Sir Thomas sold the place to that dear friend to whom he wrote with a coal a sad letter of farewell from his Tower cell before his execution. Later, his daughter, who loved the place where her dear father had passed so many days, hired it, and came here to live.