Passing westward along the northern site of the old city wall, in search of the few landmarks that escaped the Great Fire and still remain, we come to that church of all others most dear to Milton lovers. St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, is not easily entered on Sunday, except during hours of service. But a courteous question to the burly guardian of the peace who patrols the neighbourhood may effect an unlocking of the gates and a quiet stroll through the green garden that surrounds the church upon two sides. The big policeman is a good talker, and relates with gusto the ravages of the great fire a few years since, which came so near as to melt the lead upon the church roof.

The massive wall which forms a corner of the green yard is a bastion of the city wall in the time of Edward IV. Possibly the long, narrow bricks which still gleam red in the lower part may be a lingering remnant of the old Roman wall. Certainly they are the type that the Romans were wont to use. The policeman assures us that there are mysterious “submarine” passages leading from this wall, and one may well believe almost anything as one thinks of the strange sights that it has witnessed. High walls of business blocks of nondescript style replace the gaps made by the recent fire, which fortunately stopped before it touched the narrow, gabled houses of wood which cluster close about the church. These give almost the only example to-day in London of the type of building which housed the poorer class of Londoners of Milton’s time.

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CHURCH OF ST. GILES CRIPPLEGATE IN 1737

Dedicated to St. Giles, who lived about the year 700; founded in 1090; destroyed by fire in 1545, and rebuilt within the Liberty but without the City of London.

From an old engraving.

The church is on the site of an older one of 1090, and was built about one hundred years before Milton’s birth. It is late Perpendicular, and has some good detail.

As one enters the church from the garden, the first monument on his right is Milton’s, which contains his bust, under a Gothic canopy. The poet’s bones lie by his father’s, under the pavement near the choir. According to the evidence of a little book written about 1790, it seems that his coffin was opened by irresponsible persons, who found the lead much decayed and easily bent back the top. A servant-maid for a consideration let in sightseers through a window, some of whom, after satisfying their curiosity in gazing on the well-preserved figure, snatched hair and teeth and even an arm-bone to carry away as relics. A later authority questions whether it is certain that the grave thus desecrated was indeed Milton’s or another’s, and leaves a grain of comfort in the thought that perhaps his honoured remains still rest untouched by vandals.

Within this church Ben Jonson was married in 1623, and here Oliver Cromwell, a sturdy youth of twenty-one, married his bride on August 22d in 1620. Little thought the parson, as he and Elizabeth Bourchier knelt before him, to be joined in holy wedlock, that one day he would be entitled not only “Protector of England,” but “Protector of Protestantism.” A marvellous man, this Oliver, whose deeds left much to be forgiven by a later age, for they sometimes had more of the spirit of Joshua than of the Founder of the Christian Faith, and yet as a lover of England, and a minister to the court of Queen Victoria from England’s lusty kin beyond the sea has said: