A little west of it is Christ’s Hospital, which, since its establishment in 1552 by the boy-king, Edward VI., until the summer of 1902, has been one of the most noted of London schools. Its revenue is about £60,000. Its removal to Horsham in the country will provide the ample playgrounds and modern accommodations that the times demand; but even an American, to say nothing of native Londoners, must feel a pang of regret at the disappearance from the street of the bright-eyed, bare-headed lads, whose quaint costume has for centuries given their school its name of “Blue Coat School.” Anciently the boys wore caps, but now they go bare-headed through the year.
The school was originally established on the site of the Gray Friars Monastery, as a kind of asylum for poor children. Stow gives the following account of the opening of the institution. “In the month of September they took in near four hundred orphans, and cloathed them in Russet, but ever after they wore Blue Cloath Coats, whence it is commonly called the Blue Coat Hospital. Their habit being now a long coat of blue warm cloth, close to their arms and Body, hanging loose to their Heels, girt about their Waist with a red leather girdle buckled, a round thrum Cap tyed with a red Band, Yellow Stockings, and Black Low-heeled Shoes, their hair cut close their Locks short.”
“Their fare was Breakfast, bread and beer, 6.30 summer, 7.30 winter. Sunday, beef and pottage for dinners. Suppers, as good legs and shoulders of mutton as can be bought. Tuesdays and Thursdays, same dinner as Sundays. Other days, no flesh—Monday, milk porridge; Wednesday, furmity; Friday, old peas and pottage; Saturday, water-gruel. Rost beef, 12 times a year. Supper, bread and butter or bread and cheese; Wednesday and Friday, pudding pies.”
This seems to have been a liberal table compared with that of the famous Winchester school in its early days, when two meals a day were all that were allowed, except for invalids.
Stow mentions that “the King granted all Church Linnen formerly used in the Churches of London” to the hospital, as a superabundance had been found. Girls as well as boys were lodged and taught here. Stow tells us of the custom which prevailed from his day to ours: “One boy being appointed, goeth up into a pulpit there placed and readeth a chapter ... and prayers. At the end of every prayer all the boys cry ‘Amen,’ that maketh a very melodious sound. The boy that reads is designed for the university. A Psalm is named by the same boy; and all sing with a good organ that is placed in the said great Hall.” He describes the grace said by one boy in the pulpit, and the boys and girls quietly seating themselves while “multitudes of city and court” came to witness it.
An ancient writer recounts the joy of the half-starved youngsters when they were first taken into its dining-hall and saw the baskets heaped with bread, and knew that there was enough for all. Among the buildings which are about to be replaced by mercantile establishments there is little, if anything, that Milton saw. Christ’s Church, beside it, where Richard Baxter lies buried, was built by Wren a little after his time.
Where so many famous men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were to be numbered as students,—Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and others,—the one name on its register that would have most interested Milton was that of William Camden who studied here, as well as at St. Paul’s. A visitor from Boston, Massachusetts, is interested to know that in 1626, one little lad in yellow stockings and dark blue coat, who studied Latin here to some purpose, was Ezekiel Cheever, who became the master of the Boston Latin School. For thirty years he taught the Yankee boys in the little wooden house on School Street at the foot of Beacon Hill, and made them learn his famous “Accidence,” which went through many editions. Often as he wandered over the “rocky nook with hilltops three,” where “twice each day the flowing sea took Boston in its arms,” his thoughts must have turned back to the walled city with its spires and palaces and prisons which he and Milton knew when they were boys.
The London tourist, who visits London for the first time after 1902, will miss seeing one of its most fascinating sights, for he can never stand in the great dining-hall of Christ’s Hospital on a Sunday noon and see the procession of pink-cheeked lads in their knee-breeches and long skirts come trooping in an orderly procession into the great hall, bearing great platters of steaming meats and baskets piled with rolls. The “Grecians” and “Deputy-Grecians,” and the less distinguished rank and file will never again pause here to listen to the Latin grace, nor will gaze at the huge canvas on the long wall between the galleries at either end. One wonders what will become of the old desks in the schoolroom, into which a score of generations of schoolboys have carved their names, and whether in their splendid new surroundings they will not look back half regretfully to the dim old cloisters which linked them with their great historic past.
Old Newgate was a foul prison in Milton’s day. Here in filthy chambers, gentlemen like Ellwood, Defoe, and William Penn were thrown together with felons. Diagonally across the street from the huge grim prison of later days, which since 1770 has stretched its length along the thoroughfare which bears its name, is St. Sepulchre’s Church. From its tower the knell was struck for executions at the neighbouring Newgate, and many a time must the boys in Christ’s Hospital and the Charterhouse School north of it have listened in horrified curiosity as the bell tolled, and they knew it meant that a man, blindfolded and with bound hands, was standing on the scaffold in front of Newgate. St. Sepulchre’s has been much altered since Milton entered it, perhaps in search of the same monument that first of all attracts Americans. This is the monument of that bold discoverer and coloniser, John Smith, who settled Jamestown in Virginia the year before Milton was born. Who knows but Milton may have met him, or have gazed upon the dark-eyed Princess Pocahontas, who left her native forests and became the bride of the Englishman Rolfe, after she had saved the life of the gallant Captain Smith.
His old tombstone is nearly defaced, and lies in the side aisle, some yards from its original site. A replica of the original inscription is placed on a brass tablet near it: