Milton's England

by Lucia True Ames Mead

Upon the wall behind it are niches; one of them faced by a little carved arcade, through which, it is said, the nuns who were in disgrace listened to the mass from the crypt below. A large ugly piece of masonry on the same wall near the farther end once contained the embalmed body of Francis Bancroft, whose face was visible through the glass lid of his coffin. A few years since both body and tomb were placed within the crypt. According to his will, on the occasion of an annual memorial sermon for which he had arranged, his body was exhibited to certain humble folk for whom he had erected, in expiation of his misdeeds, the almshouses now at Mile End. Browning has with characteristic power depicted the Roman Jew scourged to the Christian church, and forced to hear a sermon once a year for his conversion. Perhaps some later poet may find as gruesome a theme for his sarcastic pen in the scene which imagination conjures up when these feeble and aged recipients of the gift of this erratic snob were yearly brought to listen to the tale of his benefactions, and to gaze upon his shrivelling corpse. Bancroft as a magistrate had been so unpopular that the people tried to upset his coffin on its way to the tomb, and pealed the bells.

The oldest monument in the church is to Thomas Langton, chaplain, buried in the choir in 1350. One tomb bears the remarkable name of Sir Julius Cæsar. The inscription is in form of a legal document with a broken seal, in which Sir Julius gives his bond to Heaven to surrender his life whenever it shall please God to call him. If one would see Sir Julius as Milton saw him, let him look upon his portrait that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery with his great contemporaries.

The obdurate father-in-law, the rich Sir John Spencer of Crosby Hall, is commemorated, by his son-in-law, the Earl of Northampton, in a stately alabaster tomb. The figures of Sir John and his wife rest under a double canopy, and at their feet kneels the runaway daughter, in the enormous stiff crinoline of 1609, the date of her father’s death. Some thousand men in mourning cloaks are said to have attended his funeral. The tomb of Sir John Crosby and his wife, of 1475, the beautiful and perfectly preserved tomb of Oteswich and his wife, of the time of Henry IV., and the fine figure of a girl reading, are a few of the works of art that deserve careful attention. The beauty of that which antedates the Tudor and Stuart periods, as contrasted with the works of art of those periods, is almost as marked as it is at Westminster Abbey.

When Milton lived he must have seen still standing the refectory and cloisters, and the old hall of the nuns, which was later used by the Company of Leathersellers. The whole group of buildings, with the adjacent gardens, must have formed a highly picturesque reminder of the days before King “Hal” had ruthlessly swept his besom of destruction over the many houses in the land which sheltered nuns and friars.

During Milton’s life there stood on Bishopsgate Street the first charitable institution for the insane that was ever established. Its name, “Bethlehem Hospital,” was corrupted into Bedlam, and has become a term of general application to scenes of disorder. Just after Milton’s death, it was removed to Southwark, where the gray dome of the present structure rises conspicuous amid the London smoke.

Passing northeast along the crowded thoroughfare of Bishopsgate Street, but a short distance from St. Helen’s, the student of antiquities may see, almost concealed by parasitic houses, the little ancient church of St. Ethelburga. He will need to cross the street in order to perceive the name inscribed in large letters upon the church, beneath the short tower and cupola, and above the clock and the shop that masks its front. In Milton’s boyhood, this church was ancient, and had been standing for at least three hundred and fifty years, for it is mentioned as early as 1366. Here Chaucer may have knelt to say his Paternosters.

The visitor should time his coming to the middle of the day, when the door opening upon the sidewalk is unlocked, and he may enter into the solemn little sanctuary, and at the farther end step out into the tiny garden at the rear. Here, if it be summer, he may sit in this shady retreat and meditate upon the history of the bit of ancient wall said by the verger to be a Roman wall, the fragments of which are preserved here. The church itself is plain and bare; simply a Gothic nave, with no side aisles. Its chief interest to some may be its antique organ, of uncertain date, but old enough from its appearance to have been heard by the little lad from Bread Street whose soul was full of music. One can easily imagine the father of John Milton, who was himself so skilled in the great art, bringing his son to every church within his neighbourhood that boasted such an instrument.

The church stands on the site of a much older one, and is named from the daughter of the French princess, Bertha, who brought to Canterbury, to the home of her Saxon husband, Ethelbert, the Christian religion, which was then new to pagan England. Visitors to the little church of St. Martin’s at Canterbury will recall the font in which this king was baptised into the faith of his wife.

Not far down Bishopsgate Street, upon the opposite side from St. Ethelburga’s, when Milton lived, stood a house with such a marvellous carved front with oriel windows, that when it made way for a modern business block, it was transferred to the South Kensington Museum, where it may now be seen in one of its lofty halls. In Milton’s youth, Sir Paul Pindar, its owner, was the richest merchant in the kingdom, and often loaned money to James I. and his son Charles. As ambassador to Constantinople, he did much to improve England’s trade in the East. On his return, when Milton was a schoolboy of a dozen years at St. Paul’s School, he brought, among his other treasures, a great diamond, valued at £30,000, which he loaned to the king to wear at his opening of the Parliaments; it was afterward sold to Charles I. Twenty years later, when Cromwell and Milton were fighting for the rights of Englishmen, and Charles’s strength was failing, this same Paul Pindar provided funds for the escape of Queen Henrietta Maria and her children.

He gave £10,000 for the restoration, before the fire, of St. Paul’s Cathedral. But his loyalty to the house of Stuart was put to a hard test, for the king borrowed such enormous sums that he was all but ruined. When Milton walked down Bishopsgate Street, past his quaint dwelling-house, he must have seen the mulberry-trees planted in the park to please James I. by his devoted subject. These ancient mulberry-trees disappeared only within the memory of men now living.