Begun by William Rufus in 1097. Here William Wallace, Sir Thomas More, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Robert Devereux (Earl of Essex), Guy Fawkes, the Earl of Strafford, and Charles I. were condemned to death. The chief access to the House of Commons in Milton’s lifetime was by an archway on the east side, through which Charles I. passed to arrest the Five Members. Here Cromwell, in 1653, wearing the royal purple, and holding a gold sceptre in one hand and a Bible in the other, was saluted as Lord Protector.
From an old engraving.
Close under the shadow of the towering Abbey lies the little church, St. Margaret’s, which must have had peculiarly tender associations in Milton’s mind. Here he buried his beloved second wife, whom, from Aldermanbury church, he had taken to his home in Petty France, near the Abbey, for one short happy year of married life. It is of her that he speaks in his beautiful sonnet beginning:
“Methought my late espoused saint,
Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave.”
The large memorial window to Milton at the west end of the church was in recent years presented by Mr. Childs of Philadelphia. This depicts numerous scenes from “Paradise Lost” and from Milton’s life. He is represented as a youth visiting the aged Galileo, and as the old blind poet dictating his immortal lines to his two daughters. The inscription by Whittier expresses the thought and feeling not only of the New England poet, but of every American scholar:
“The New World honours him whose lofty plea
For England’s freedom made her own more sure,
Whose song immortal as his theme shall be
Their common freehold while both worlds endure.”
Amongst the Puritans who preached here was the famous Richard Baxter, author of “The Saints’ Rest,” whose glum visage in the National Gallery reveals little of the true nobility of his character and of his well-ordered mind. The modern inscription by Lowell on Raleigh’s memorial here has been already mentioned.
The church is rich in monuments of figures clad in the fashions of Milton’s time and that which just preceded it, the architectural accessories of which indicate the gradual deterioration of Renaissance decoration. The rare old glass of the chancel window is referred to in every guide-book, and its remarkable history need not be here detailed. In the reign of Charles I. fast-day sermons were preached here, and both houses of Parliament met here with the Assembly of Divines, and prayed before taking the covenant.