Part 6 (1/2)
The famous open-air pulpit called ”Paul's” or ”Powle's” Cross--noted for so many eloquent and impa.s.sioned harangues from mediaeval divines,--for the proclamation of kings,--for the denunciation of traitors,--used to stand at the north-east corner of the churchyard.
It was a canopied cross, raised on stone steps; a big elm marked its site until some fifty years back. Open-air services, discontinued after the demolition of ”Paul's Cross,” were attempted to be revived by Wesley and Whitefield; and, even in our own day, an open-air pulpit is used, in summer, at Trinity Church, Marylebone Road, and largely attended, as any one who pa.s.ses by Portland Road Station on Sunday afternoon may see for himself. Public confession for crime was also made at ”Paul's Cross,” and Jane Sh.o.r.e did penance here, as described by Sir Thomas More. East of St. Paul's, where now a line of tall warehouses rises, was, until 1884, St. Paul's School, founded in 1509 by Dean Colet, friend of Erasmus, and now removed to new red brick buildings at Hammersmith; a tablet on one of the warehouses marks its site. The old fas.h.i.+oned Deanery of St. Paul's,--a homely building, not unlike a quiet country rectory, with red tiled sloping roofs, and nearly hidden behind high walls,--is in Dean's Court, just south of the cathedral. Close by it is St. Paul's Choristers' School, built in 1874 by Dean Church.
Returning to the portico of the north transept, it is pleasant to sit awhile in St Paul's Churchyard, where the doves coo and the pigeons flutter. Or if you stand by the iron gate of the enclosure, and raise your eyes to the blackened walls and columns, you will see, above the north porch, an inscription on a tablet, perpetuating the memory of the great builder, ”in four words which comprehend his merit and his fame:” ”Si monumentum requiris, circ.u.mspice.” (If thou seekest his monument, look around.) ”The visitor,” says Leigh Hunt, ”does look around, and the whole interior of the Cathedral ... seems like a magnificent vault over his single body.” And, gazing, in this sense, on the great man's tomb, the burning words of Ecclesiasticus suggest themselves, read by the Bishop of Stepney at the unveiling of Lord Leighton's monument:
”Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us. The Lord hath wrought great glory by them through his great power from the beginning.... Leaders of the people by their counsels, and by their knowledge of learning meet for the people, wise and eloquent in their instructions.... All these were honoured in their generations, and were the glory of their times. There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported. And some there lie, which have no memorial ... but ... their glory shall not be blotted out. Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.”
CHAPTER V
THE TOWER
_Prince Edward_: ”Did Julius Caesar build that place, my lord?”
_Buckingham_: ”He did, my gracious lord, begin that place; Which, since, succeeding ages have re-edified....”
_Richard of York_: ”What, will you go unto the Tower, my lord?...
... I shall not sleep in quiet at the Tower.”
_Gloucester_: ”Why, what should you fear?”
_Richard of York_: ”Marry, my uncle Clarence' angry ghost: My grandam told me he was murder'd there.”
--_King Richard III., Act iii, Scene 1._
”Death is here a.s.sociated, not, as in Westminster Abbey and Saint Paul's, with genius and virtue, with public veneration and imperishable renown; not with everything that is most endearing in social and domestic charities; but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingrat.i.tude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame.”--_Macaulay_: ”_History of England._”
”Place of doom, Of execution too, and tomb.”--_Scott._
What Londoner has not, from earliest childhood, been acquainted with the Tower? In the Christmas holidays it presented, as a ”treat,” rival attractions with Madame Tussaud's and the ”Zoo.” When not presented under the too-informing care of over-zealous pastors and masters,--when not imbibed as too flagrant material for that fly-in-the-ointment, a holiday task,--when not made, in a word, too suggestive of the unpleasant, but necessary paths of learning,--it offered great fascinations to the youthful mind. The warders, in their picturesque ”Beefeater” dress, were ever an unfailing joy; the surprise, indeed, with which I first saw one of these mighty beings descend from his pedestal, and deign to hold simple conversation with ordinary mortals, is still fresh in my memory. Then, the towers and dark pa.s.sages, up which one could run and clatter joyfully, with all the entrancing and horrid possibility of meeting somebody's headless ghost; the attractive thumbscrew, model of the rack, and headsman's mask, all so appealing to the innocent brutality of childhood; the very wooden and highly coloured ”Queen Elizabeth”, riding in full dress, with a page, to Tilbury Fort; the stiff effigies of the mail-clad soldiers, in rows inside the White Tower,--the live soldiers drilling in the sun-lit square outside;--the inspiring music of the band, the roll of the drum, the flocks of wheeling pigeons; how charming it all was! My first knowledge of Tower history was derived from a c.o.c.kney nursemaid, who had, I suspect, strong affinities with the before-mentioned ”pretty soldiers” (are not ”pretty soldiers,”
by-the-way, usually the first words that London children learn to lisp?). Tragedies, I knew, were connected with that sun-lit square.
Two beautiful ladies, I was told, had had their heads cut off here by their cruel husband, a gentleman called ”'Enery the Eighth,” (I naturally thought of this ”'Enery” as Bluebeard); ”because they was that skittish like, and fond of singin' and dancin' on Sundays, which 'e for one never could abear; and so 'e 'ad their 'eds orf, and gra.s.s adn't never grown on the place sence.” Which fact I identified as true, at least for the time being; though how far gra.s.s can grow through paving-stones, is always matter for speculation. And Mary-Anne further went on to relate how she ”'ad a friend who knew a young woman who was a 'ousekeeper somewhere here, who 'ad seen 'orrible things in the way of ghostisses, and 'ad the screamin' 'sterrics somethin'
awful;--quite reg'ler, too,--after it!”
[Ill.u.s.tration: _A Beefeater._]
Yet I myself think that it is a pity to treat the cla.s.sic Tower on such familiar terms! It should be approached with respect, and not merely introduced as a juvenile appendix to Madame Tussaud's! The charm of the old fortress, as of its immediate surroundings, is, in any case, only realised in maturer years. This has always been the riverside stronghold of London. Tradition, and poetic license, name, indeed, Julius Caesar as its founder; however that may be, the Romans probably had a fort here, as Saxon Alfred after them. The White Tower, or Keep, raised by William the Conqueror, is built upon a Roman bastion; and Roman relics have been dug up at intervals in its near precincts. Nevertheless, the Roman tradition here is but visionary; the interest of the Tower is bound up with the evolution of the English race. It is the most interesting mediaeval monument that we possess, a still vivid piece of English history; a stranded islet of Time, left forgotten by the raging tide of surrounding London.
In the Tower precincts,--if you are careful not to choose a Monday or Sat.u.r.day, which are free days, for your visit--you may enjoy yourself in your own way and to your heart's content. The warders,--old soldiers,--are pleasant and un.o.btrusive people, with manners of really wonderful urbanity, considering the very mixed, and generally unwashed, character, of a large portion of their public. The Tower, apart from the charm of its lurid and romantic history, is a picturesque place. In winter, it is somewhat exposed to the elements, and in summer, owing to its proximity to the Temple of the Fisheries, it is perhaps a trifle odoriferous; but on a fine spring or autumn morning,--a spring morning uncursed by east wind, an autumn morning undimmed by river-mist,--you will realise all the beauty, as well as the interest, of the place. Part of its attraction lies in the fact that it is neither a ruin nor a fossil; it is a living place still, and serves for use as well as for show. In old days by turn palace, state prison, inquisition, and ”oubliette,” it is now a barrack and government a.r.s.enal. Its threatening ring of walled towers, witnesses of so many scenes of blood and cruelty, re-echo now to the merry voices of little School-Board boys, playing foot-ball in the drained and levelled moat below; its paved courts and gravelled enclosures still ring to the tramp of soldiers' feet, but soldiers of a newer and a more humane era. In days when men suffered cheerfully for faith's sake, when queens and princes pa.s.sed naturally to the throne through the blood of their nearest relations, when self-denial, conscience, and uprightness of life were reckoned as crimes, the Tower was the place of doom and death. Here, not only political plotters and state prisoners, guilty of ”high treason,” were punished, but also children, young men and maidens, playthings of an unkind fate, were condemned, unheard, to an early death. Here, also, at the Restoration, perished, bravely as they had lived, many of the st.u.r.dy and loyal followers of a bad cause, who might say, with Macaulay's typical ”Jacobite”:
”To my true king I offered, free from stain, Courage and faith; vain faith, and courage vain.”
Later, the martyr annals of the Tower were in a measure defiled by the introduction of real and noteworthy criminals, and the imprisonment within its walls of such wretches as the Gunpowder Plot conspirators, the infamous murderers of Sir Thomas Overbury, and the notorious Judge Jeffreys. But the desecration of these is past; the Tower has long ceased to be a State Prison, and the halo of its earlier victims still is paramount there. The very names of certain localities recall their tragedies: ”b.l.o.o.d.y Tower,” commemorating the murder of the young princes, sons of Edward IV., whose bones were found here under a staircase; Traitor's Gate,--the gate of the doomed,--the grim disused archway, with a portcullis, looking towards, and in ancient times opening on to, the river.
The Tower is full of lovely ”bits” for the sketcher. The succession of fine old gates that span the entrance-road, and the ring of encircling towers called the ”Inner Ward,” though necessarily restored in places, have still a fine air of antiquity; which air of antiquity the ma.s.sive walls, narrow window-slits, and the close-growing mantle of ivy that, in places, adds a welcome note of greenery, do much to maintain. The effect, at any rate, is complete. In the Tower precincts you seem to be really in mediaeval London. Just so, you imagine, in all essentials, only still gra.s.sy and not quite so shut in by houses, must ”Tower Green” have looked on that terrible day so dramatically described by Froude:
”A little before noon, on the 19th of May, Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, was led down to the green where the young gra.s.s and the white daisies of summer were freshly bursting in the suns.h.i.+ne. A little cannon stood loaded on the battlements, the motionless cannoneer was ready with smoking linstock at his side, and when the crawling hand upon the dial of the great Tower clock touched the midday hour, that cannon would tell to London that all was over.”
On this same spot, so fatal to youth and beauty, two other young women,--mere girls, indeed,--died; poor silly Katherine Howard, and, later, Lady Jane Grey, a child of eighteen,--the ”queen of nine days,”
a victim of others' offences,--who ”went to her death without fear or pain.” Neither age nor youth were, indeed, spared in those cruel days; for the grey hairs of the aged Countess of Salisbury, last of the Plantagenets, were here also brought to the same block. This was the private execution spot, reserved for special victims and near relations, in contrast to the public one on Great Tower Hill outside; the exact place is enclosed, and marked by a square patch of darker stone. In the little adjoining chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula--the Prisoners' Chapel,--aptly dedicated to St. Peter-in-the-Chains,--were buried all these poor dishonoured bodies; Queen Anne Boleyn's, so short a time ago so loved, so adulated, thrown carelessly into an old arrow-chest, and flung beneath the altar. This chapel,--which is, by the way, a royal chapel, and therefore under no bishop's jurisdiction,--is very much restored, but it has a few good monuments; and its list of victims, numbered on a bra.s.s tablet inside the door, is sufficiently affecting: ”In truth,” says Macaulay:
”there is no sadder spot on earth than this little cemetery.
Hither have been carried through successive ages, by the rude hands of gaolers, without one mourner following, the bleeding relics of men who had been the captains of armies, the leaders of parties, the oracles of senates, and the ornaments of courts.”