THE GREYFRIARS' HOUSE [(Page 16)]
As, however, we are but amateur pilgrims, and not very tired, we will loiter about the city. Let us ask Mr. Pierce's permission to trespass in his Franciscan Gardens in Stour Street, near the Post Office. For there we shall find, neglected and decayed, but still beautiful with a sad and ruined beauty, the last monument of the Greyfriars or Franciscans, once the most popular of the monastic orders. It is a little house which occupies no ground, for it is built on arches over a branch of the Stour, and its slender supporting pillars rise from the middle of the river bed. As we consider it, we may remember the story of Elizabeth Barton "The Holy Maid of Kent", the devout, visionary, hysterical girl, promoted from a kitchen to a nunnery, who, amongst other and harmless or edifying revelations, felt bidden to denounce the King's divorce from Katherine, and was taken, or bravely went, to Henry to tell him so.
The poor creature was executed at Tyburn with some six of her teachers, confessors, and abettors, amongst them the warden and one of the brethren of Greyfriars, who must often have gone in and out of this battered doorway. Let us add, to the credit of luckless Anne Boleyn, that she alone of all concerned had the grace to intercede with her royal tiger on the girl's behalf. There is a perhaps more attractive memory clinging to the place. In the seventeenth century here, for a time, lived Richard Lovelace, the handsomest man of his time—the Royalist poet who wrote two of the best songs in the language, the gay cavalier who died in want and despair because his lady-love, on his reported death, married another man. He may have written "Going to the Wars" in this very house—
"I could not love thee, dear, so much
Loved I not honour more".
But "To Althea"—
"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage",
he wrote while imprisoned by the House of Commons for presenting a Kentish Petition on behalf of King Charles.
While we are thinking of poets, and their not infrequent tendency (in the past) to a bad end, we may as well walk up High Street. Various epochs and ages look down upon us on either side, though too often through modern windows. Near the top, on the right-hand side, we shall find a very old house with a very new front, and the business label of Achille Serre. This is the birthplace of Christopher Marlowe, one of the nest of Elizabethan singing-birds—