East London

by Walter Besant

So to the Jews old Canaan stood,

While Jordan rolled between.

Mark how exactly the view fits the lines, and how the lines fit the view. This is as it should be, for good old Isaac Watts stood often here and gazed upon that scene; the swelling flood was the winding river Lea; the sweet fields lay before him in living green. That is why I have brought you to this place. Dr. Watts might have stood here at another season, when a low, white mist hung over the sweet fields and obscured the swelling flood, and when the Christian knew not what lay between him and the everlasting hills beyond, where he fain would be at rest.

Clapton.

He lived not at Clapton, but at Stoke Newington, on the west of Clapton. If we could have seen this suburb seventy years ago! But the place is overgrown and overcrowded; workmen’s houses cover its gardens like a tangle of ugly weeds. Still there is one place left which it will please you to visit; on the map of 1830 it is the only street in the village. It is called Church Street; you enter it from the high road running north; it promises at the outset to be common, mean, and without dignity or character. Patience! we pass through the mean part and we emerge upon a Street Beautiful. It consists of houses built of that warm red brick which, as Ruskin has pointed out, grows richer in color with age; they are houses of the early eighteenth century with porches and covered with a wealth of creepers; the street has associations of which I will speak presently. Meantime, it is delight enough merely to stand and look upon it. The street ends with two churches. Happier than Hackney, Stoke Newington has been able to build a new church, and has not been obliged to pull down the old one. You see the new church; it is in the favorite style of our time, perhaps as favorable a specimen as can be found; in a word, a large, handsome, well-proportioned church. It was good that such a church should be built, if only to show that when Stoke Newington passed from a small rural village to a great town it did not outgrow its attachment to the Anglican faith. The old church could no longer accommodate the people; a new one therefore was built, a church urban, belonging to a great population beside the other. The old church is not dwarfed by the new; happily, the broad road lies between; it is a charming and delightful village church, standing among the trees and monuments of its churchyard. It has been patched, repaired, enlarged; it is, I dare say, a thing of patchwork—an incongruous church; yet one would not part with a single patch or the very least of its incongruities. There is Perpendicular work in it, and Decorated work; there is also nondescript work. They did well to keep it standing; it is a venerable monument; its spire is much humbler than that of its splendid successor, still it points to heaven; it has what the other will never have, the bones of the villagers for two thousand years; and still, to admonish the men of to-day as of yesterday and the day before, over the porch hangs the dial, with the motto, “Ab Alto”—“From on High,” that is, “cometh Safety, cometh Wisdom, cometh Hope” in the language of the ancient piety.

I have spoken of the intimate connection of these villages with Nonconformity. The Nonconformist cause was very strong among the better class of London merchants during the hundred and fifty years from 1650 to 1800. Hackney and other places in this part of the London suburbs are occupied to a large extent by their country houses. When the Act of Uniformity was passed and the Nonconforming ministers were ejected, many of them were received by the merchants of London in their country houses, and when the Conventicle Act of 1663 forbade the Nonconformists to frequent any place of worship other than the parish church, it was in their private houses at Hackney and other suburbs that the merchants were able, unmolested, to worship after their own consciences.

Before this, however, there had been Puritan leaders in the place. Two of them were regicides. On the east of the tower in Hackney churchyard stood until recently a chapel or mortuary chamber built by one of the Rowe family and called the Rowe Chapel. There was a Sir Thomas Rowe (or Roe), who was Lord Mayor of London in 1568; he married the sister of Sir Thomas Gresham, who founded the Royal Exchange; his son was also lord mayor in his time, his grandson, Sir Henry Rowe, built this chapel. Among the descendants was one Owen Rowe, citizen and haberdasher, a fierce partizan—in those days every one was a partizan and every one was fierce. He was colonel of the Green Regiment for the Parliament, so that he could fight as well as argue. Owen Rowe, unfortunately for himself, was one of those who took a leading part in the trial and execution of the King, being a signatory to the warrant for that execution. After the Restoration he surrendered, and by an act of clemency, of which Charles was sometimes capable, he was not executed, but sentenced to imprisonment in the Tower of London for the rest of his days. He died in the December following, and was buried in this chapel.

The other regicide of Hackney was John Okey, one of the Root and Branch men. He was a very turbulent Parliamentarian; he was of humble origin, beginning, it is said, as a drayman; he had no education, but he developed military genius of a kind and became a colonel of cavalry under Cromwell. After the Restoration he fled to Germany, where he might have continued in security to the end of his days, but being tempted to venture into Holland was there arrested by the English minister, Sir George Downing, and brought over to England with two other regicides, Miles Corbet and John Barkstead. Pepys records the event. It is astonishing that Sir George Downing should have done this, since he owed everything he had in the world to the favor of Cromwell. However, it was done, and on March 16, 1662, Pepys says that the pink Blackmore landed the three prisoners at the Tower. He adds that the Dutch were a long while before they consented to let them go, and that “all the world takes notice of Sir George Downing as a most ungrateful villain for his pains.” A month later, on April 19th, Pepys goes to Aldgate and stands “at the corner shop, the draper’s,” to see the three drawn on their way to execution at Tyburn. “They all looked very cheerful and all died defending what they did to the King to be just.” While at Hackney, Okey lived in a house called Barber’s Barn, formerly the residence of Lady Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, and mother of Lord Darnley, husband of Alary Queen of Scots, a curious little fact which connects Hackney with Queen Victoria, Darnley’s descendant. The regicide’s estate was confiscated, but his widow got permission to retain Barber’s Barn, where she lived till her death. Okey himself was buried somewhere in Hackney churchyard.