After long continuance in the hands of Protestants, the church has again reverted to the faith of those who built it. It is the only instance of a “living” crypt in London, i. e., one in which tapers burn and kneeling worshippers assemble before shrines. On any week day, one may in three minutes turn from Holborn into its mediæval quiet and seclusion and tell one’s beads, either in the upper or lower sanctuary, or gaze at the glorious decorated east window, and on the chaste proportions of an unspoiled Gothic structure. Its wealth of windows remotely reminds one of the Sainte Chapelle of good King Louis, whose jewelled windows in their slender lofty frames are one of the marvels of the island in the Seine.
In the Plantagenet and Tudor period, vineyards, kitchen garden, and orchard surrounded the magnificent buildings of Ely Place. Hither, at the Duke of Gloucester’s bidding, as Shakespeare, following history, records, the bishop sent hastily for the strawberries for which his garden was famous.
“My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn
I saw good strawberries in your garden there;
I do beseech you send for some of them.”
In the reign of Elizabeth, Sir Christopher Hatton was the owner of Ely Place. Except a cluster of houses,—Ely Rents,—standing on Holborn, the land round about this great estate seems to have been unbuilt upon.
Sir Christopher, who rose to be Elizabeth’s lord chancellor, was a striking looking man and a graceful dancer. He captivated the queen, who was very susceptible to manly beauty. The state papers in the Record Office, it is said, disclose her fond and foolish correspondence with him. In Milton’s lifetime, Lady Hatton—a gay and wealthy widow—was wooed and won by the famous Sir Edward Coke. But Hatton House saw many an open quarrel between the ill-matched pair.
In the time of Charles I., a pageant almost unparalleled in magnificence was arranged in Ely Place. The redoubtable Prynne, who had preached against all such frivolities in the customary strong language of the time, had not yet lost his ears, as he did later, in the pillory. But his strictures had given offence at the court of Queen Henrietta Maria, who was minded to amuse herself with masques; consequently this famous masque came off. Mr. Lawes, the famous musician and friend of Milton, was set to composing music for the occasion. On an evening in 1633, when Milton was living at Horton, the magnificent procession wended its way through crowds of enthusiastic spectators toward Whitehall. One hundred gentlemen on the best horses that the stables of royalty and the nobility could offer, all clad in gold and silver, and each accompanied by a page and two lackeys carrying torches, were only one feature of the pageant; the others were some of them as odd as these were splendid. Tiny children, dressed like birds, rode on small horses; every beautiful or fantastic conceit imaginable was carried out, and the cost of the whole was no less than £21,000, a sum which meant far more in purchasing power than it does to-day. Some of the musicians, however, received £100 apiece—a fee quite satisfactory to many a prima donna in our time.
No more characteristic part of Milton’s London exists to-day than the various Inns of Court that lead north and south from Holborn. As the sightseer passes from the jostle and turmoil of the thoroughfare, he is transported in a moment into a silence and seclusion that remind one of a Puritan Sabbath. Quadrangle opens out of quadrangle, shut in by rows of unpretentious buildings, whose monotony is broken by Gothic chapels or Tudor dining-halls surmounted by carved cupolas. Occasionally a cloistered walk under low Tudor arches, or a group of highly ornate terra cotta chimneys is seen, as one wanders around the dim and shadowy passages. All at once a turn, and behold, here in the heart of the life of this six million people of the great overgrown metropolis, still stretch long reaches of greensward, locked safely from the intrusion of the public by their handsome wrought-iron gates.
In Gray’s Inn, to the north of Holborn, Francis Bacon wrote his “Novum Organum,” which he published in 1620, when Milton was a schoolboy at St. Paul’s, and when the Leyden Pilgrims in the Mayflower landed on Plymouth Rock.
The gardens of Gray’s Inn, which Bacon set out with trees, became a fashionable promenade in Milton’s old age. Pepys tells us that he took his wife there after church one Sunday, “to observe the fashions of the ladies, because of my wife’s making some clothes.” It was, in short, quite as much a dress parade as Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday in New York.
Lord Burleigh, Elizabeth’s great minister, was, next to Bacon, the most eminent of the members of Gray’s Inn.