The present gateway was not erected until the following century. In the reign of Edward VI., the church with the “graven gilt and enamelled bell-tower” was undermined and blown up with gunpowder, and the stone was used for building the Lord Protector’s House upon the Strand. To-day the members of the revived English League of the Order of St. John hold their meetings in the gate.
With the exception of Westminster Abbey, probably no church has more of interest than St. Bartholomew’s at Smithfield. Within the century that saw the White Tower of the Conqueror begun, a monastery and church rose on this site. “A pleasant-witted gentleman, who was therefore called ‘the king’s minstrel,’” as Stow relates, was blest with a most singular vision on his pilgrimage to Rome. Like Saul of Tarsus, he felt the Lord’s command to leave his old life and begin anew. Accordingly on his return to England he established a priory for thirteen monks, and in 1123 built the Norman church, part of which stands practically as he left it. Says a nineteenth-century antiquary: “Except the Tower and its immediate neighbourhood, there is no part of London, old or new, around which are clustered so many events interesting in history, as that of the priory of St. Bartholomew-the-Great and its vicinity. There are narrow, tortuous streets, and still narrower courts, about Cloth Fair, where are hidden away scores of old houses, whose projecting eaves and overhanging floors, heavy, cumbrous beams and wattle and plaster walls must have seen the days of the Plantagenets. There are remains of groined arches, and windows with ancient tracery, strong buttresses, and beautiful portals, with toothed and ornate archways, belonging to times long anterior to Wyclif and John of Gaunt yet to be found lurking behind dark, uncanny-looking tenements.... When Chaucer was young, and his Canterbury Pilgrims were men and women of the period, processions of cowled monks and chanting boys, with censers and crucifix, wended their way from the old priory of the Black Friars beside the Thames; and when Edward III. had spent the morning in witnessing the tourney of mailed knights at Smithfield, have they and their attendants, with all the pomp and pageantry of chivalry, passed beneath this old gateway to the grand entertainment of the good prior in the great refectory beyond the south cloisters.... As we go round the Great Close we pass by some very old houses that occupy the place where was once the east cloisters. Behind these houses used to be a great mulberry-tree, only removed in our own time.”
Here may Milton, during those dark days of the Restoration, when he retired to the seclusion of these narrow streets to escape observation, have sometimes ventured. Here sitting on the stone seat beneath its shade, he may have seen in fancy the processions of sandalled monks, with rosaries dangling against their long gray robes, move silently by as in the olden time, and pass within the portals of the church. And stepping beneath its round arches, he may himself have stood, as countless monks and pilgrims before him have done, before the recumbent painted figure of the tonsured monk, Rahere, who lies under a beautifully wrought Gothic canopy of a much later period. Around him rise the solemn, massive pillars with their cubiform capitals, which seem scarcely less fresh and solid than when Rahere gazed on them with pride. Here are to be seen the slight intimations, even amid Norman semicircular arches, of the Gothic pointed arch that was to supersede them in the near future. Of the four superb arches which once supported the great central tower, two are the half-circle and two are slightly pointed.
An interesting and lovely feature of the church is the oriel window by the triforium, opposite Rahere’s grave, built by the famous Prior Bolton. Here the prior seems to have had a kind of pew or seat from whence he could overlook the canons when he pleased, without their being aware of his presence, as it communicated with his house. The aisles form a fine study for the architect. The horseshoe Moorish arch is much used, as well as the simpler Norman arch, and there is seen a regular gradation from one to the other.
Among the tombs that must have most interested Puritan Milton was one of James Rivers, who died in 1641 just as the civil war was about to break forth, who evidently, had he lived, would have thrown in his lot where Milton did. His epitaph contains the lines:
“Whose life and death designed no other end,
Than to serve God, his country, and his friend;
Who, when ambition, tyranny, and pride
Conquered the age, conquered himself and died.”
A tomb that may have interested Milton is that of Sir Walter Mildmay, the founder of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, which sent so many Puritans to the new colonies in Massachusetts. It was this Mildmay to whom, when he came to court, Queen Elizabeth said: “I hear, Sir Walter, that you have erected a Puritan foundation.” “No, madam,” was the answer, “but I have set an acorn, which when it becomes an oak, God knows what will be the fruit thereof.”
In Milton’s time many Puritans lived in the parish, and a manuscript book preserved in the vestry records that there was “Collected for the children of New England uppon 2 Sabath daies following in february, 1643, £2, 8. 9.” This was a goodly sum for those days, and was doubtless much appreciated by the English cousins, who in their bare pine meeting-houses beside the tidal Charles remembered that the Puritans who remained at home were called to wage a fiercer fight with priestcraft, prerogative, and privilege than they, with poverty.
The church to-day is but a fraction of its former size, in fact, hardly more than the choir of the noble building which Rahere erected. The entire length of the church as it left his hand is supposed to have been 225 feet. In 1539 Sir Richard Rich bought church and priory for little more than £1,000, and the thirteen evicted canons were pensioned off.
Close by old St. Bartholomew’s is Smithfield, so near that, in the reign of the Tudors, the ruddy light of martyrs’ fagots must have cast a glow upon its roof and its walls must have resounded to the screams of sufferers in their last agonising moments.