Passing through Smithfield market, one soon comes to the Charter House (a corruption of the French word Chartreuse), the old monastery of the Carthusians. The arched gateway is the original entrance into the realm of silence of those old monks. Over it two lions grotesquely carved support an en-tablature. The lion is typical of solitude and the wilderness, and is often found represented beside the hermits of the desert. A porter leads the way at once to the chapel by a passage paved with tombstones and hung with memorial tablets. One familiar name on the wall makes the heart leap, though a modern name:
Gulielmus Makepeace Thackeray, Carthusiani Carthusiano.
H. M. P. C.
Natus, MDCCCXI. Obiit, MDCCCLXIII.
Alumnus, MDCCCXXII-MDCCCXXVI.
Beside this white marble slab is one precisely like it in memory of John Leech.
The Elizabethan chapel is solemn and interesting with its dark oaken pews, its arched roof, on the keystones of which are carved the Charter House arms, and the monumental tombs here and there. A bright coal-fire in an open grate gives it a comfortable, homelike aspect that must be grateful to the aged pensioners. And there are hassocks of straw for them all to kneel upon. Over one of the doors is an arch of modern stained glass, but with colors of unusual richness, or seemed so, coming in from the neutral tints of a dense fog. There is Magdalen with her golden hair, and the other Maries, with beautiful faces and purple, red, and amber robes.
At the north of the chancel is the tomb of Thomas Sutton, the founder of the Charter House Hospital, in the style of James I.'s reign. He lies, cut in marble, on a marble tomb, with ruff and long gown, and hands folded palm to palm as peacefully as if they never itched to acquire riches. Two men in armor support an inscription attesting his beneficence. Some persons of a qualifying turn do say that he was, like many others who are very charitable with their money when they see the impossibility of keeping it any longer in their grasp, guilty of what has been called the "good old gentlemanly vice of avarice," and was the original of Volpone the Fox. However that may be, the many who are sheltered here have reason to roar as loudly as they can, and as we are told they do, on the 12th of December, with cracked voices and half-palsied tongues, the chorus of the Carthusian melody:
"Then blessed be the memory
Of good old Thomas Sutton,
Who gave us lodging—learning,
And he gave us beef and mutton."
Catholics, however, cannot forget that when young he took part in the Italian wars, and was present at the sacking of Rome. At a later period he commanded a battery as a volunteer at the siege of Edinburgh, when that city held out for poor Queen Mary. And he aided in the expedition against the Spanish Armada by fitting out a ship named Sutton for himself, which captured a Spanish vessel worth twenty thousand pounds. When he came to London to reside, it was reported that his purse was fuller than Queen Elizabeth's exchequer, and in time he became the banker of London, and had the freedom of the city.