London

by Walter Besant

Crutched Friars' Church was made into a carpenter's shop and a tennis court. Their refectory, a very noble hall, became a glass-house, and was burned to the ground in the year 1575.

St. Mary's Spital, outside Bishopsgate, which had been a hospital with one hundred and eighty beds, was entirely destroyed and built over. But Spital Square, which now remains, marks the site of the church-yard, where stood (in the north-east corner) the famous spital pulpit, from which, for three hundred years, sermons were preached at Easter before the Lord Mayor and Aldermen and the citizens. It is an illustration of English conservatism that long after the hospital was demolished, and when the pulpit stood in an ordinary square of private residences, the same custom was kept up, with the same official attendance of the corporation.

The Nunnery of St. Helen's became the property of the Leathersellers' Company. The nuns' chapel still remains forming the north part of a church, which, for its antiquity and its monuments, is one of the most interesting in London. The nuns' refectory formed the Company's Hall until the year 1790, when, with its ancient crypt, it was pulled down to make way for the present St. Helen's Place. Considerable ruins of the nunnery remained until the same time.

The Church of the Knights Hospitallers was blown up with gunpowder; its ruins and those of the priory buildings remained for many years. The Charter House was first given by Henry VIII. to Sir Thomas Audley, passed from him to Lord North, to Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, to Lord North again, to the Duke of Norfolk, to the Crown, to the Earl of Suffolk, and to Thomas Sutton. The last transfer was in 1611. Sutton endowed it as a charity under the name of the Hospital of King James. This noble foundation has ever since existed as a hospital for decayed gentlemen and a school for boys. Some of the old monastic buildings yet survive in the Charter House. Its name of the Hospital of King James has long been forgotten. The place has been celebrated by Thackeray, and it is, at this day, the most beautiful and the most venerable monument of old London.

The magnificent Church of the Dominicans, or Black Friars, was destroyed. Either the hall of the abbey or a portion of the church was used as a storehouse for the "properties" of pageants—strange fate for the house of the Dominicans, those austere upholders of doctrine. A play-house was erected by Shakespeare and his friends among the ruins, which remained standing for a long time. Only a few years ago the extension of the Times offices in Printing House Square brought to light many substantial remains. The Abbey of Bermondsey furnished materials and a site for a great house for the Earl of Sussex. A tavern was built on the site, of the Church of St. Martin's le Grand. The Church of St. Bartholomew's Priory was pulled down to the choir, which was converted into a parish church. The bells were put up in the tower of St. Sepulchre. The Church of the Grey Friars was spared; but as for its monuments—consider! There were buried here the queens of Edward I. and Edward II., the queen of David Bruce, an innumerable company of great lords, nobles, and fighting men, with their dames and daughters. The place was a Campo Santo of mediæval worthies. Their monuments, Stow writes, "are wholly defaced. There were nine tombs of alabaster and marble, environed with 'strikes' of iron, in the choir, and one tomb in the body of the church, also coped with iron, all pulled down, besides sevenscore gravestones of marble." The whole were sold for £50 or thereabouts by Sir Martin Bowes, goldsmith and Alderman of London. Surely the carved marble and sculptured alabaster did not teach the hated papistical superstitions; yet they all went; and it was with bare walls, probably washed white or yellow to hide the frescos, that the building became the parish now called Christ Church. The monastery buildings were converted into the Bluecoat School.

Such was the fate of the greater houses. Add to these the smaller foundations, all whelmed in the common destruction; the colleges, such as that of St. Spirit, founded by Whittington; that founded by Walworth; that founded by Richard III., attached to Allhallows Barking; St. John's, Holywell; St. Thomas of Acon, a rich foundation with a lovely church; the College of Jesus; the Hospital of St. Anthony; Jesus Commons; Elsing Spital; and we begin to realize that London was literally a city of ruins.

It is at first hard to understand how there should have been, even among the baser sort, so little reverence for the past, so little regard for art; that these treasure-houses of precious marbles and rare carvings should have been rifled and destroyed without raising so much as a murmur; nay, that the very buildings themselves should have been pulled down without a protest. Once only the citizens remonstrated. It was in the hope of saving from destruction the lofty and most beautiful spire of Austin Friars, but in vain. It seems to us impossible that the tombs of so many worthies should have been destroyed without the indignation of all who knew the story of the past. Yet in our own day we have seen—nay, we see daily—the wanton and useless destruction of ancient buildings. Winchester House, which ought to have been kept as a national monument, was pulled down in 1839; Sir Paul Pinder's house, another unique specimen, vanished only yesterday; within the last few years a dozen city churches have been destroyed, in total disregard to their historical associations. At this very moment the church where John Carpenter, Whittington's executor and the founder of the City of London school, the church whose site has been consecrated as long as that of any church in the city, where King Alfred may have worshipped, is standing roofless, waiting to make way for offices not wanted. Nay, the very city clergy themselves, the official guardians of all that is venerable, have, in our own days—the actual, living city clergy!—basely sold their most beautiful old house, Sion College, and built a new and garish place on the Thames Embankment, which they call Sion College! It is unfortunately too true that there is not, at any time or with any people, reverence for things venerable, old, and historical, save with a few. The greater part are careless of the past, unable to see or feel anything but the present. The city clergy of to-day are no better than Sir Thomas Audrey, Sir Arthur Darcie, and the rest.

There were other ruins. Cromwell's men were not the only zealots against popish monuments, signs, and symbols. The parish churches were filled with ruins. The carved fonts were defaced; the side chapels were desolate and empty; the altars were stripped; the rood screens were removed; the roods themselves were taken down; the painted walls were whitewashed; the simple service that was read in the vulgar tongue seemed to the people at first a ruin of the old mass; the clergyman, called minister or priest, who preached in the black gown, was a ruin of the priest in his gorgeous robes; the very doctrines of the Protestant faith seemed at first built out of the ruins of the old, as the second Temple was built upon the ruins of the first, and was but a poor thing in comparison. At first only, because the work was thorough, and in a single generation all the traditions of the ancient faith were lost and forgotten.

If, indeed, the Reformation was to be carried at all, it was necessary, for the prevention of civil war, that it should be thorough. Therefore the young generation must be made to believe that a return of the old things was absolutely impossible; that the old religion could never, under any circumstances, be revived. When Queen Mary ascended the throne, the work was only half done; the Protestant faith had not yet taken root; yet when she died, five years later, no lamentations were made over the second departure of the priests. It is a commonplace that the flames of Smithfield, more than the preaching of Latimer, reconciled the people to the loss of the old religion. I do not think that the commonplace is more than half true, because the flames were again kindled, and more than once, in the reign of Elizabeth without any murmur from the people. Henceforth the old religion was dead indeed, and impossible to be revived. When Shakespeare came up to London, he found many who could remember the monks—gray, white, and black; the Franciscan—innocent of the old simplicity; the rich and stately Benedictine; the austere Dominican; the pardoner and the limitour; the mass, and the holy days of the Church; but we find in Shakespeare's writings no trace of any regret for their disappearance, or of any desire for their return. The past was gone; even the poetic side of a highly poetic time was not touched, or hardly touched, by the sadness and pathos of this great fall; the dramatists and poets have made nothing out of it.