Milton's England

by Lucia True Ames Mead

The great hall, which to-day contains the library, is on the site of that of Boniface, who built the first in the thirteenth century. Archbishop Juxon, who attended Charles I. upon the scaffold, rebuilt the present edifice after the original model, which had been destroyed during the Commonwealth. One of the great treasures of this library is Caxton’s “Chronicles of Great Britain,” which was printed in 1480 at Westminster. The Mazarin Bible, the Life of Laud, with the autograph of Charles I., and many books and manuscripts of great rarity and value are also preserved here. The library is open to the public under proper regulations on five days in the week. Among the names of eminent men who have served as librarians over this small but precious library, none interests us more than that of John Richard Green, the historian of the English people.

The chapel, built in the last half of the thirteenth century, is the oldest part that remains. An opening into Cranmer’s ancient “parloir” is now the organ-loft. From the chancel one has a glimpse of the original beautiful ceiling. The wall pillars of Purbeck marble in the atrium are said to be one thousand years old. In this chapel two of the first American bishops were consecrated. The oak screen was erected by Archbishop Laud. This chapel contained the windows that were destroyed in the Civil Wars, which served as such a theme of controversy in Laud’s trial. He testified as follows: “The first thing the Commons have in their evidence against me, is the setting up and repairing Popish images and pictures in the glass windows of my chapel at Lambeth, and amongst others the picture of Christ hanging on the cross between two thieves in the east window; of God the Father in the form of a little old man with a glory, striking Miriam with a leprosy; of the Holy Ghost descending in the form of a dove; and of Christ’s Nativity, Last Supper, Resurrection, Ascension, and others.... To which I answer first, That I did not get these images up, but found them there before; Secondly, that I did only repair the windows which were so broken, and the chapel, which lay so nastily before that I was ashamed to behold, and could not resort to it but with some disdain, which caused me to repair it to my great cost; Thirdly, that I made up the history of these old broken pictures, not by any pattern in the mass book, but only by help of the fragments and remainders of them which I compared with the story.” It is related that at a dinner of the domestics during Laud’s primacy, the king’s jester pronounced the grace, “Give great praise to God, but little Laud to the devil,” for which jest he paid by long imprisonment.

In the so-called “Lollards’ Tower” at the west end of the chapel, the only part of the existing palace that is built of stone, is a niche in which was placed the image of St. Thomas à Becket, to which Dean Stanley tells us “the watermen of the Thames doffed their caps as they rode in their countless barges.”

The small room at the top of the tower is wainscoted with oak over an inch thick, upon which prisoners chained to its iron rings have carved words in early English and Latin. Through the oubliette in the floor dead prisoners were doubtless dropped into the Thames, which in former days washed the very walls of Lambeth, and swept under this tower. Whether any Lollards were ever lodged here is very doubtful, although it is true that Wyclif, the arch-Lollard, was at one time examined for his opinions, by the bishops at Lambeth. The real Lollards’ Tower seems to have been an adjunct of old St. Paul’s Cathedral. More probably the prisoners here were Episcopalians of Milton’s own time.

In the dark crypt, the wretched queen, Anne Boleyn, heard from the lips of Cranmer the annulment of her marriage with Henry, and was forced to affirm the disinheritance of her offspring. From thence she went to the Tower and her doom. In this same palace, where she lay a prisoner in 1533, her predecessor, Katharine of Aragon, was a guest on her arrival in England in 1501. Milton must doubtless sometime have visited this princely residence, and have mused upon the martyred Cranmer and Latimer and Sir Thomas More, and the long list of kings and queens and men, who, as masters, guests, or prisoners, have slept within these walls. Of all the noted men who were connected with Lambeth in his day, none, of course, so stirred his spirit as did Archbishop Laud, who lived here, and exercised his power in the Star Chamber, during the years when Parliament was silenced. From 1633 until his committal to the Tower on the charge of treason in 1641 after the assembling of the Long Parliament, he was master here. It was while here at Lambeth that he supervised the compilation of the Service Book; when this was enforced in 1637 upon the Scottish churches, it was so repugnant to them that the riot begun in Edinburgh, by Jenny Geddes flinging her stool in St. Giles’s Cathedral at the bishop’s head, initiated a national revolt, which led to the signing of the famous Scottish National Covenant. Milton at this time, at the age of thirty, was living at Horton. Little by little the resolute archbishop came to be looked upon by men of Milton’s way of thinking as one whose system demanded submission to absolutism in the state. The student of Milton’s prose writings is familiar with the troublous history of Laud’s time, and the ludicrously trivial matters that then estranged earnest men. But, while the ceremonies permitted in the church two generations later were practically those that Laud had so zealously striven for, the result, says Gardiner, “was only finally attained by a total abandonment of all Laud’s methods. What had been impossible to effect in a church to the worship of which every person in the land was obliged to conform, became possible in a church which any one who pleased was at liberty to abandon.” After Laud’s execution the see of Canterbury was vacant nearly seventeen years. Among the many portraits of the archbishops which hang at Lambeth, the portrait of Laud by Van Dyck is one of the most admirable. We read that his successor, Sheldon, in 1665, in the time of the Great Plague, “continued in his palace at Lambeth whilst the contagion lasted, preserving by his charities multitudes who were sinking under disease and want, and by his pastoral exertions procured benevolences to a vast amount.” Admission to Lambeth must be obtained by written request, but is by no means difficult, yet no important spot in London is so rarely visited by the general public. The enthusiasm and intelligence of the resident guide, who has several times in the last ten years conducted the writer through its historic precincts, makes an hour at Lambeth a memorable lesson in English history. His huge gray cat, whose name, “Massachusetts,” in other years brought a smile to the lips of every American who chanced to learn it, no longer purrs a welcome to the dim corridors and towers of the old palace, but has gone the way of all his short-lived contemporaries. Let us hope that his master may for many years to come live to tell the long, romantic tale of these old walls to all of England’s kin beyond the sea who journey hither to study with reverent eyes the history of the land from which they came.

Among places of minor interest in Southwark, which doubtless Milton well knew, was the “Tabard Inn,” the starting-point of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims. This stood on High Street, and was not demolished until 1875. In Milton’s time it was inscribed: “This is the Inne where Sir Jeffrey Chaucer and the nine and twenty pilgrims lay in their journey to Canterbury anno 1380.” It had then a more modern façade than Chaucer saw. The Globe Theatre of Shakespearian fame was then on the site of the present brewery of Barclay, Perkins, & Co. The visitor to the region just south of London Bridge who would see a bit of quaint domestic architecture that recalls the past, would do well to seek out, amid the noisy, hideous streets, a tiny green oasis, bordered by what is known as the Red Cross Hall and cottages. Thanks to Miss Octavia Hill and her friends, the little Gothic hall, with its frescoes of civic heroes, designed by Walter Crane, and its little row of picturesque gabled houses, stand here as a rest and solace to weary eyes and hearts that hunger amid ugliness for beauty. Just such houses Milton saw at every turn in the beautiful old London that he knew.

No church in Southwark and only two or three in London are of so great interest to the antiquarian as St. Saviour’s or St. Mary Overy’s, whose curious name is explained in every guide-book. It has a record of more than a thousand years. Chaucer, Cruden, the author of the “Concordance,” Doctor Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Baxter, and Bunyan were closely connected with this church and parish. In one of its chapels, in the generation preceding Milton, beneath its three-light window, the Bishops of Winchester and London, and others acting for the see of Rome, tried and condemned to death by the flames seven ministers of Christ. Their only crime was opposition to the “usurpations of the Papal Schism.” Among these were the rector of the church in which a half century later Milton was baptised, Bishop Hooper, who was burned at Gloucester, and John Rogers, the famous martyr of Smithfield. Another heretic, more fortunate than these seven, had just previously been condemned to the stake and pardoned for the sake of his musical talents. In this stately edifice, which has recently been admirably restored, lies the dust of many dear to lovers of poetry. Chaucer’s fellow poet, friend, and teacher, John Gower, lies under a lofty Gothic canopy; his sculptured head rests on three large volumes, which represent his works. Milton’s contemporaries, Massinger and Fletcher, lie buried in the same grave. The latter died of the plague when Milton was at Cambridge. His well-known poem on “Melancholy,” beginning:

“Hence, all you vain delights,
As short as are the nights
Wherein you spend your folly!”

was probably familiar to the young poet at Horton, when he penned his “Il Penseroso,” although Fletcher’s poem was not published until after that. Both Massinger and Fletcher are commemorated by modern windows. The latter’s colleague, Francis Beaumont, whose writings are so indissolubly connected with his, is honoured with a window in which the friendship of the two is typified by the figures of David and Jonathan.

The year before Milton’s birth, the author of “Hamlet” and “Lear” doubtless stood within the choir of this church beside the grave of his young brother Edmond, an actor, who died at the age of twenty-seven, when his great elder brother’s genius had nearly touched its zenith of creative power. The parish boasts that some of the most magnificent masterpieces of the world’s literature were written within its borders by this, its most distinguished parishioner, and England’s greatest son. In his youth Milton may well have attended the funeral of the great Bishop Andrewes, whose recumbent effigy is on one of the tombs that scholars will seek out. This man, who knew fifteen languages, was president of the little company of ten who gave the world a large part of the King James version of the Hebrew Scriptures, whose perfection of literary form has never been equalled. In the Lady-Chapel may still be seen inscribed upon the windows the virulent words which would not have as greatly offended Milton’s taste as that of the present parishioners: “Your sacrament of the Mass is no sacrament at all, neither is Christ present in it;” “From the Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities, good Lord deliver us.”