The crypt is reputed to be the finest now remaining in London. It is a portion of the ancient hall of 1411. The north and south aisles had formerly mullioned windows, which are now walled up. The vaulting, with four centred arches, is notable, and is probably of the earliest of that type.
The Guildhall was founded in 1411, in the time of Henry IV., and when Milton was a boy had attained a certain venerableness. Within its walls had taken place, not merely the civic banquets for which its modern successor is noted, but also many tragic scenes in English history. Here the evil-minded Protector who wished to supplant his boy-nephew, Edward V., had his name presented to the assembled multitudes as the legitimate monarch, by his oily courtier, Buckingham. The people, “marvellously abashed,” listened in dead silence, as the accomplished orator proclaimed the bastardy of the little prince, and urged the claims of his ambitious uncle. The speaker, somewhat disconcerted, explained again, louder and more explicitly, his meaning. “But were it for wonder or fear, or that each looked that other should speak first, not one word was there answered of all the people that stood before; but all were as still as the midnight.” Then the recorder was summoned to use his efforts with the people. “But all this no change made in the people, which alway after stood as they were amazed.” At last some servants of the duke, and ’prentices and lads “thrusted into the hall amongst the press,” began suddenly to cry out aloud: “King Richard, King Richard,” and “they that stood before cast back their heads marvelling thereat, but nothing they said. And when the duke and the mayor saw this manner, they wisely turned it to their purpose, and said it was a goodly cry and a joyful to hear every man with one voice, and no man saying nay.” Thus a bold coup, struck with a masterful hand, surprised an honest people without organised opposition and leadership, and as so many times in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race, the voice of a small and powerful minority was impudently declared to be vox populi.
One of the saddest sights that the Guildhall Milton knew ever witnessed was the trial, in the reign of Henry VIII., of that young lady, Anne Askew, whose courage and devotion never were surpassed within the Colosseum, among the Christians who fought with beasts or were sawn asunder. Having become a Protestant, she was driven by her husband, who was a papist, from his home. King Henry, it might have been supposed, would have at least taken no action against her, but she was arrested and examined. The lord mayor of London asked her whether the priest cannot make the body of Christ, to which she replied as shrewdly as Jeanne d’Arc to her inquisitors: “I have read that God made man; but that man can make God, I never yet read.” She was condemned at Guildhall to death for heresy. A daughter of a knight, this delicate lady, reared in comfort, was carried to the Tower, thrust into a cell, where but for a few brave friends she would have starved, and then her tender body was put on the rack, and Chancellor Wriothesley himself applied such power as nearly rent it in sunder. The story of her cruel death amid the flames at Smithfield belongs rather to that bloody spot than to the Guildhall. Her life she could have saved, even at the last moment, had her heroic soul faltered, and unsaid what conscience taught. Those were tales to freeze the life from out young hearts, that grandames told in Milton’s boyhood. To the men of his day, Guildhall stood chiefly connected with some of the most remarkable trials in England’s history.
Among them was that of Throckmorton for complicity in Sir Thomas Wyatt’s attempt against the Catholic Queen Mary. In those days, when trial usually meant speedy death, his acquittal, due to his own forensic skill and eloquence, is recounted in detail by historians as most remarkable. He it was whose tomb in St. Catherine Cree’s is mentioned, and for whom a London street is named.
The church of St. Mary Aldermanbury is one that few visitors to London ever enter, but the follower in Milton’s footsteps will not fail to seek out, a little west of the Guildhall, this church, whose registers record that here Milton, at the age of forty-eight, married his second wife, Katherine Woodcocke. Aldermanbury derives its name from the ancient court or bery of the aldermen, which is now held at the Guildhall. The church stands in its tiny green churchyard closely surrounded by business blocks, amidst the bustle of the city; on a summer noontide, in its shady retreat, the seats are filled with loiterers who chat or meditate or read their papers around the central monument.
This monument, though modern, is of great interest. It records the fact that J. Heminge and Henry Condell, Shakespeare’s fellow actors and personal friends, lived many years in this parish, and are buried here. Says the inscription: “To their disinterested affection the world owes all that it calls Shakespeare; they alone collected his dramatic writings, regardless of pecuniary loss, and without the hope of any profit gave them to the world.
“First Folio: ‘We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead, without ambition of selfe-profit or fame, only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend alive, as was our Shakespeare.’
“Extract from Preface: ‘It had been a thing, we confesse, worthie to have been wished, that the author himselfe had lived to have set forth and overseene his own writings, but since it hath been ordained otherwise,... we pray you do not envy his Friends the office of their care and paine to have collected and published them, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them, who as he was a happy imitator of nature, was a most gentle expression of it. His mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered, with that easiness that wee have scarse received from him a blot on his papers.’” In 1656 Milton’s marriage took place in the earlier church, of very ancient foundation. The present building was designed by Wren, and was begun in 1668, during Milton’s blindness. It has a square tower capped by a square bell turret about ninety feet in height.
The register of the church, which was preserved, records that: “The agreement and intention of marriage between John Milton, Esq., of the parish of Margaret’s in Westminster, and Mrs. Katharine Woodcocke of Mary’s in Aldermanbury, was published three several market days in three several weeks ... and no exception being made against their intentions, they were according to the act of Parliament, married on the 12th of November, by Sir John Dethicke, Knight and Alderman, one of the Justices for the Peace in the City of London.” A justice instead of a clergyman was prescribed by the Marriage Act which was then in force.
Judge Jeffreys of bloody memory is buried in the church (d. 1689).