In 1816, when the ruins were to be removed, crowds thronged to see the remains of John of Gaunt’s old palace.[209] The workmen found it difficult to destroy the mossy and ivy-covered walls and the large north window; the masses of flint, stone, and brick being eight or ten feet thick. The screw-jack was powerless to destroy the work of Chaucer’s time. The masons had to dig, pickaxe holes, and loosen the foundations, then to drive crowbars into the windows and fasten ropes to them, so as to pull the stones inwards. The outer buttresses would in any other way have defied armies.
Some of the stone was soft and white. This, according to tradition, was that brought from Caen by Queen Mary. The industrious costermongers discovered this, and cut it into blocks to sell as hearthstones. A fire about 1777 had thrown down much of the hospital, so that the old level was fifteen or twenty feet deeper. The vaults and subterranean passages were unexplored. The wells were filled up. The workmen then pulled down the German chapel, which stood next Somerset House, and the red-brick house in the Savoy Square that was used for barracks. “The entrance,” says a writer of 1816, “to the Strand or Waterloo Bridge will be spacious, and the houses in the Strand now only stop the opening.”[210]
The Chapel of St. Mary, Savoy, is a late and plain Perpendicular structure, with a fine coloured ceiling. This small, quiet chapel holds a silent congregation of illustrious dead.
THE SAVOY CHAPEL.
Here are interred Sir Robert and Lady Douglas (temp. James I.); the Countess of Dalhousie, daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, Lieutenant of the Tower, and sister to that admirable wife, Mrs. Hutchinson, who died in 1663; William Chaworth, who died in 1582, a member of that Nottinghamshire family, one of whom, Lord Byron’s predecessor, killed in a tavern duel; and Mrs. Anne Killigrew, who died in 1685, the paintress and poetess on whom Dryden wrote an extravagant but glorious ode, beginning—
“That youngest virgin daughter of the skies,
Made in the last promotion of the blest.”[211]
This accomplished young lady was daughter of Dr. Henry Killigrew, and niece of Thomas Killigrew the wit, of whom Denham, the poet, bitterly said—
“Had Cowley ne’er spoke, Killigrew ne’er writ,
Combined in one they’d made a matchless wit.”
The father of Mistress Killigrew was author of a tragedy called The Conspiracy, which both Ben Jonson and Lord Falkland eulogised. Even old Anthony Wood says, in his own quaint way, that this lady “was a Grace for beauty, and a Muse for wit.”[212]