In Milton’s day, a grim old fortress marked the “Sanctuary,” or place of refuge for criminals. From the sacred shelter of this retreat the mother of the little Edward V. surrendered him with sad misgiving to his cruel uncle, who carried him to the Tower. This spot was a resort for persecuted saint and guilty sinner. Within its walls he was as secure as was the ancient Hebrew in his city of refuge. When Milton lived in Petty France and passed from there to Whitehall by the Sanctuary, it had fallen into disrepute and only the most abandoned sought its shelter. The Sanctuary at Westminster was only one of thirty known to have been contemporaneous with it in the monasteries of England before the Dissolution.

The magnificent royal palace of Westminster, which was built by Edward the Confessor, and improved by William the Conqueror, had largely disappeared in Milton’s time. The Great Hall and the crypt under the chapel of St. Stephen are almost all that now remain, but Milton, in addition to these, saw the chapel itself and its cloisters, and the famous “Star Chamber” and “Painted Chamber,” which were preserved until the fire which burned the Houses of Parliament in 1834. Previous to the Dissolution, the Commons had sat within the ancient Chapter House of the Abbey, at an inconvenient distance from the House of Lords. Then they were transferred to St. Stephen’s Chapel, an oblong building ninety feet in length and thirty in width, which had externally at each corner an octagonal tower. It was lighted by five windows on each side, between which its walls were supported by great buttresses. It had two stories, and the upper one was occupied by the House of Commons. These walls have echoed to the ringing words of Eliot, Hampden, Pym, Sir Harry Vane, and Cromwell, to Burke and Fox and Pitt, and the long line of valiant Englishmen who never confounded patriotism and loyalty to country with subserviency to the will of any fallible man whom chance had placed upon the nation’s throne. Here Eliot, in sharp, emphatic words, which contrasted with the ponderous phraseology of the time, cried out against the gorgeously apparelled and arrogant Buckingham: “He has broken those nerves and sinews of our land, the stores and treasures of the king. There needs no search for it. It is too visible. His profuse expenses, his superfluous feasts, his magnificent buildings, his riots, his excesses, what are they but the visible evidences of an express exhausting of the state, a chronicle of his waste of the revenues of the Crown?... Through the power of state and justice he has dared ever to strike at his own ends.” Bold words! which took more courage than to face the cannon’s mouth, for his protest then and later meant to face a dungeon in the Tower, from which only death gave him release.

But Eliot’s words were a tonic to his fellows, and when they met two years later, in 1628, Sir Thomas Wentworth showed himself a worthy follower: “We must vindicate our ancient liberties,” said he, “we must reinforce the laws made by our ancestors. We must set such a stamp upon them, as no licentious spirit shall dare hereafter to invade them.” Of the Petition of Right, and the Remonstrance; of the dissolution of Parliament, and the eleven years when these walls were silent; of Charles’s revival of Star Chamber trials to fill his empty exchequer by the fines, and the Parliamentary history of the Civil War, and all that centres around these walls which echoed with the eloquence of England’s noblest statesmen, there is no space to speak.

The Star Chamber was probably so named from being anciently ornamented with golden stars. It stood parallel with the river on the eastern side of Palace Yard and was formerly the council chamber of the police. It was a beautiful panelled room with mullioned windows. The lords who tried offences were bound by no law, but they created and defined the offences which they punished. Every penalty except death could be inflicted. In such tyrannies the Star Chamber could have been exceeded only by the terrible Council of Ten in Venice. One of the first deeds of the new Parliament of 1641 was to abolish the Star Chamber. That year a mob of six thousand citizens in Old Palace Yard had come armed with swords and clubs, and had seized the entrance to the House of Lords and called for justice against Lord Strafford.

The Painted Chamber was named from its mural decorations, which antedated Milton’s time at least three hundred years. It was strangely proportioned, eighty feet long, twenty broad, and fifty feet high. Here the Confessor died. Here was the trial of Charles I. when it was adjourned from Westminster Hall. Here his death warrant was signed, which is now preserved within the library of the House of Lords.

Says Knight: “Amid all the misgovernment of the reign of Charles II., the rights of the House of Commons and its true position in the Constitution were recognised in a manner in which they had never been in the former days of the monarchy. Attempts were made to manage the Parliament, and also to govern without it; but when it was suffered to meet, its debates were nearly as free as they are at present, and took as wide a range as they have ever done since. The Commons for session after session during this reign discussed the question of excluding the heir presumptive to the throne, the king’s own brother, and even passed a bill for that purpose. Would any approach to such an interference as that have been endured either by Elizabeth or James I.?... and this change, this gain had been brought about by the Long Parliament and the great Rebellion.”

In the time of Milton the pillory stood before Westminster Hall, and here he may have seen, on one of his trips from Horton in 1636, the stiff-necked Prynne branded on either cheek, and exposed with one ear cut off, according to the barbarous methods of the time, for writings which were supposed to have reflected on the queen. In those days the noble proportions of the hall were partly masked by neighbouring shops. The architecture and the long history of this famous hall of William Rufus are almost as familiar as those of Westminster Abbey, and therefore need little comment here. The story of Guy Fawkes and the sentence passed upon the conspirators here in 1606 was one of the first bits of English history that a boy born but two years later would have heard. In 1640, Charles I. and his queen, concealed behind the tapestry of a dark cabinet, listened to the trial of Strafford, which lasted eighteen days. Nine years later the king sat at his own trial beneath the banners of his troops, which had been taken at the battle of Naseby. When the clerk read the words: “Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, traitor, murderer,” etc., the king is said to have laughed in the face of the court. In Pepys’s diary we get a glimpse, a few years later, of the commercial uses to which this stately edifice had been degraded, for we find little booths and stalls for selling scarfs and trifles were ranged along the walls of the interior. More than a hundred years later, part of the hall seems to have been reserved for stalls, which presumably were removed for coronation days and the great functions, for which its stately proportions are so well fitted. The building is one of the most spacious edifices of stone whose roof is unsupported. The roof of Irish oak is said to be always free from spiders and insects.

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WESTMINSTER HALL