Westminster

by Walter Besant

Here we make an end: it is not a Survey of Westminster to which you have been invited; it is but this side and that side of the many-sided life of this remarkable City, which is, as was pointed out at the beginning, unlike any other city in the world, in having no citizens, but only residents or tenants; no municipal life; which welcomed all the scum, riffraff, and ribauderie of the country, and gave them harbor; which has always belonged to the Church, yet has never been expected to have any morals; always its streets and courts have been crammed with thieves and drabs, gamesters, sporting men, cheats, and bullies; and beside the streets always stood the stately Monastery, the quiet cloister, the noble Church, the splendid Court, the gallant following of king and noble, and the gathering of grave and responsible knights and burgesses assembled to carry on the affairs of the country. I have invited you to restore Thorney as it was long ago, the stepping-stone and halting-place of all the trade of the island, busy and noisy; the life of the Benedictine in his monastery; the consecration of the Anchorite; the strange life of the mediæval Sanctuary;

THE WESTMINSTER TOBACCO BOX.

the Palace of the Plantagenets; the Palace of the Stuarts; the Masques of James I.; the Parliamentary side of the last century; and the streets and slums. A great many things have been purposely omitted from these pages which belong to Westminster and have taken place there. For instance, there is the School with its long line of scholars, afterward famous. Nothing has been said about the School. There is, again, the Abbey Church. Very little has been said about the buildings; the additions, alterations, restorations: nothing at all has been said about the monuments which crowd its aisles and transepts. There is Westminster Hall. Very little, indeed, has been said here of the things done within its walls: the Coronation Banquets; the Trials; the Receptions. Nothing has been said concerning the executions and the tournaments which have taken place in Palace Yard, Old and New. Nothing has been said about the New Houses of Parliament. These things, and a great many more which the reader can remember for himself, have been omitted from these pages, partly because they belong to the history of this country and may be found in all Histories—they happened in Westminster and they belong to Great Britain; partly because they have already been so well treated that it is unnecessary and would be even presumptuous for me to attempt them; and partly because the space at my disposal is limited, though the materials are practically inexhaustible. These chapters are not to be considered as a History of Westminster, or a Survey: they are pictures of the City with its Palace, its Abbey, its Sanctuary, and its slums, from a time when London did not exist until the present day.

APPENDIX.
THE COURT OF CHARLES II.

The popular imagination pictures the Court of Charles the Second as a place of no ceremony or state or dignity whatever; where the King strolled about the courts and where there was singing of boys, laughter of women, tinkling of guitars, playing of cards, making merriment without stint or restraint, a Bohemia of Courts. We have been taught to think thus of King Charles’s Court by the historian who has seized on one or two scenes and episodes—for instance, the last Sunday evening of Charles’s life; by the writer of romance; by the chronicler of scandal; by the Restoration poets and the Restoration dramatists.

This view of Whitehall after the Restoration is, to say the least, incomplete. Charles had a Court, like every other sovereign; he had a Court with officers many and distinguished; there were Court ceremonies which he had to go through; that part of his private life which is now paraded as if it was his public life was conducted with some regard to public opinion. What his Court really was, may be learned from a little book by Thomas de Laune, Gentleman, called “The Present State of London,” published in the year 1681, for George Lurkin, Enoch Prosser, and John How, at the Rose and Crown. Since we have seen what were the chief offices of the Confessor’s Court and of Richard the Second’s Court, it may be useful to learn, from this book, the offices and management of a Stuart’s Court.

Its Government, Ecclesiastical, Civil, and Military.

1. Ecclesiastical.—The Dean of the King’s Chapel was generally a Bishop. The Chapel itself is a Royal Peculiar, exempt from episcopal visitation. The Dean chose the Sub-Dean or Precentor Capellæ; thirty-six gentlemen of the Chapel, of whom twelve were priests and twenty-four singing clerks, twelve children, three organists, four vergers, a sergeant, two yeomen, and a Groom of the Chapel. The King had his private oratory, where every day one of the chaplains read the service of the day. Twelve times a year the King, attended by his principal nobility, offered a sum of money in gold, called the Byzantine gift, because it was formerly coined at Byzantium, in recognition of the Grace of God which made him King. James the First used a coin with the legend, on one side: “Quid retribuam Domino pro omnibus quæ retribuit mihi?” and on the other side: “Cor contritum et humiliatum non despiciet Deus.”