Read Ebook: Unnoticed London by Montizambert Elizabeth

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Ebook has 560 lines and 22995 words, and 12 pages

The new owner, buoyed with hopes of a marriage with Mary, Queen of Scots, began to put his new house in order. He added the screen in the great hall and the "Tarrass Walk," the lovely tapestry room, the duchess's withdrawing-room and the magnificent great staircase.

On the 6th of August, 1568, Elizabeth came in state from Hampton Court to Howard House, to pay a visit to her disloyal servant, already plotting against her and arranging the duchess's salon for her rival. The air was thick with intrigue, and by the autumn the rumour of the marriage with Mary had reached Elizabeth. Norfolk denied it, but a year later the truth came out, and he spent some time in the Tower, to be released, under surveillance, when the Black Death threatened that district.

He had learned no lesson. Either a devouring ambition or the attraction of the most fascinating woman in Europe lured him on. Plots and counterplots were hatched in the long gallery that now forms part of the upper-story quarters of the Master and Registrar of Charterhouse. Mary's emissaries were seized--one of them, called Bailly, has carved the lesson these events taught him in the Beauchamp Room in the Tower--and the luckless queen was betrayed in her turn, even as Elizabeth had been, by the man who so short a time before had decorated the Charterhouse to receive her as a bride.

He told, like a coward, the place where her cipher was hidden under a tile in the Charterhouse, but nothing could save his own neck, and he followed his father and his two girl cousins, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, in June 1572.

The next owner of Howard House, Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, was only a boy of fifteen when he inherited his father's property, but he was of sterner stuff, for he refused to abjure the Roman Catholic faith he had embraced, even to see his wife and children, before he died, worn out, and under sentence of death, in 1595. Elizabeth had kept him prisoner in the Beauchamp Tower for ten years, and it

was there, in 1587, that he carved the words, "The more suffering for Christ in this world, so much the more glory with Christ in the life to come."

Lord Thomas Howard was one of the honoured, trusted servants of Elizabeth, and she came once more in 1603, not long before her death, to pay him a visit in the Charterhouse.

But brave Lord Thomas Howard was building a new house at Audley End, and needing money he sold Howard House for ?13,000 to Sir Thomas Sutton. The brilliant days of the Charterhouse as a nobleman's mansion were at an end--another chapter was concluded and the third phase of the story was to begin.

Sir Thomas Sutton, the new owner, was the Lord Rhondda of the sixteenth century. He was a Lincolnshire man with a wide knowledge of men and things, whose military profession never prevented his having a keen eye for business. He made a large fortune before he died in 1611, leaving the provision to found a hospital for eighty impoverished gentlemen and a school for forty boys, under the name of the Hospital of King James in Charterhouse.

Among the Charterhouse scholars have been the bearers of great names such as Lovelace and Crashaw, Addison and Steele, John Wesley, Sir Henry Havelock, Thackeray, Leech, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Lord Alverstone and many others. The school was removed in 1872 to Godalming, and the buildings were taken over by the Merchant Taylors' Company for their boys' school.

The hospital for the poor brothers no longer harbours eighty men. Their number is reduced to sixty owing to the depreciation in the value of Sir Thomas Sutton's land and the fact that since the Charterhouse has always been considered a wealthy foundation no further bequests have ever been made to bring the number once more up to the four score of the founder's intention.

That, briefly told, is the dramatic tale of the Charterhouse. You will readily believe it all if you take the District Railway to Aldersgate Street and go and see the Charterhouse for yourself. Its beauty is unimpaired by time. The Guesten Hall where the poor brethren take their meals, the great sixteenth century carved staircase, the chapel where Colonel Newcome sat, the false duke's arcade, and the old gatehouse--all are there and many more things to recall the most dramatic pages of England's history.

A STROLL IN WHITEHALL AND WESTMINSTER

"And all that passes inter nos, May be proclaimed at Charing Cross." SWIFT.

Dr. Johnson once said, "Why, sir, Fleet Street has a very animated appearance, but I think the full tide of human existence is at Charing Cross."

Certainly Charing Cross is the best of all starting-points for exploring expeditions, and by Charing Cross I mean the south-east corner of Trafalgar Square.

From there you may wander along the Strand, or north into Bloomsbury, or through Cockspur Street into the realms of Mayfair, or southward to the Thames, and in every direction there are unnoticed stories to be found.

UNITED SERVICES MUSEUM

"More kindly love have I to that place than to any other in yerth."--CHAUCER.

At the corner of the Horse Guards Avenue I paused undecided, having taken months to summon up courage to pass the giant at the entrance to the United Services Museum!

He snorts with such a supercilious sniff at the would-be visitor that you have to remember it may possibly be only the good-natured contempt of one service for another, and that the Orion's figurehead may really be elevating his nose at the Horse Guards across the way, on which I notice that Spencer Compton, 8th Duke of Devonshire also bends a grave and somewhat disapproving eye from his elevated statue in the middle of the road.

To come back to the United Services Museum--a thing that far too few people do, for it is one of London's many buried treasures--don't be misled by any optimistic guide-book that tells you the admission is sixpence. That is only true on Saturday afternoon; at other times you part with a shilling unless you are a soldier or sailor in uniform, or one of the many troops of schoolchildren that are admitted free every week.

There are myriads of things to delight any childish heart--cunningly contrived models of ships, plans of battles, the actual walking-stick and snuff-box of Sir Francis Drake, Oliver Cromwell's sword, the very bugle that sounded the Charge of the Light Brigade, a room devoted to souvenirs of Lord Wolseley, and rows of other treasures with heroic stories of brave men.

I have yet to find a museum without a Napoleonic souvenir, and here there is a startling one--"Marengo's" skeleton. You are so engrossed by the relics of General Wolfe and Nelson and Wellington and other heroes, that you almost forget what you came to see--the Old Banqueting Hall where they are lodged, the beautiful Palladian structure that Inigo Jones built in 1622--all that is now left of the old palace of Whitehall.

Comely and calm he rides Hard by his own Whitehall.

A little crowd clusters every morning at

On the king's birthday, June 3rd, the Trooping of the Colour at the Horse Guards is an unforgettable pageant.

It is a gallant sight, and a goodly thing to see.

WESTMINSTER ABBEY

"It is a wonderful place ... a nation, not a city."

Even more than of the British Museum I feel that it would be an impertinence to speak of Westminster Abbey as a London corner unnoticed by Londoners,--and yet I have known people who have left London and gone back across the seas with never a thought for the cloisters nor a "memorie" of Jane Lister, "dear childe," who lies buried there, people who may have perfunctorily "done" the Abbey with a guide but have never lingered there at the uncrowded hours till the exquisite beauty of its many corners has become a possession they can carry away with them.

I can make no attempt to point out the manifold interest of the Abbey, but there are certain places that I love that I would not willingly let anyone miss.

To miss seeing that thirteenth-century octagonal room is a calamity. It is not only very beautiful, with a beauty that reminds you at once of the Sainte Chapelle, but there is an atmosphere about it that takes you back through the centuries to the time when Simon de Montfort was laying the foundations of constitutional government, and the first parliament of twenty-three barons, one hundred and twenty ecclesiastics, two knights from each shire and two burghers from each town met in this very room.

The House of Commons was born within these grey walls nearly five and a half centuries ago, when the Commons were told to go to "leur ancienne place en la maison du Chapitre de l'Abbeye de Westminster." The members met here till they moved to the Chapel of St. Stephen, within the walls of Westminster Palace, in 1547.

Turn your back on the ugly cases of the seals

and charters that should have been removed to the Record Office with the rest of the public records that were stored here since Elizabethan days, and look instead at the faint fourteenth-century mural decoration of Christ surrounded by the Christian virtues. Even the unsightly cases cannot destroy the sense of the lovely proportions of the shaft-supported roof and the arcaded walls with the six noble windows, filled with glass none the less beautiful because it happens to be modern, and all the more interesting because it honours the memory of that great lover of Westminster, Dean Stanley.

A few steps farther along the cloister is another less well-known corner, the Chapel of the Pyx--not so ecclesiastical a chamber as it sounds, "pyx" meaning only a chest or box where the standard of references for testing the coins of the realm used to be kept. Nowadays they make these tests at the hall of the ancient Company of Goldsmiths, at the corner of Foster Lane and Gresham Street.

Long ago the king's treasure was kept here, and only the king and my Lord Chancellor and the Abbot of Westminster had the keys, a fact that was very inconvenient when a robbery occurred, as at least one abbot found to his cost. He and forty of his monks saw the inside of the Tower in consequence, but punishment was not always so light, as the pieces of human skin still to be seen nailed to the door will show.

Inside the seven-locked door with its gruesome lining, that is only opened to visitors on Tuesdays and Fridays, you find a low vaulted room supported by rounded Romanesque arches on thick short pillars, and a stone altar--the earliest in the Abbey.

After leaving the Chapel of the Pyx, stroll along the Norman cloister to the left, past the Norman undercroft, where, if you have a mind to pay a small fee to the verger in the Poets' Corner, you can see any day in the week the quaint effigies that used to be carried at royal funerals. Through the dark entry you come to the Little Cloister, a part of the old monastery, that ought only to be seen on a hot summer's day, for in the winter-time it is dreary and your thoughts tend to turn to the smug ingratitude that allowed the woman Nelson loved to die in poverty,--for she once lived in the tower built by Abbot Littlington and originally the bell tower of the church.

Turn back through the south walk of the Great Cloister and come into the Deanery Yard.

It is customary to write to the dean for permission to see the Jerusalem Chamber, but, if you go without this formality and he happens to be absent, the caretaker will show it to you and tell quite unique stories which I will not steal his thunder by repeating.

ASHBURNHAM HOUSE

"If ever princess put all princes down, For temperance, prowess, prudence, equity; This, this was she, that, in despite of death, Lives still admired, adored, Elizabeth!" ANON.

Coming out of Dean's Court and passing through the gateway in the east side of Dean's Yard, you find another enticing and little-known corner in Westminster School in Little Dean's Yard.

There are many interesting things about the school and the buildings that I leave untold, so go and see for yourself this quiet backwater of London.

ST. MARGARET'S CHURCH

"That, if I chance to hold my peace, These stones to praise Thee may not cease." GEORGE HERBERT.

St. Margaret's Church, open till four except on a Saturday, is interesting not only for its architectural beauty, but for its many associations, and since 1916 it has had a deepened interest for the British Dominions beyond the Seas, as it was then created their parish church.

Pepys, who simply refuses to be left out of anything, was married here to his pretty wife, of whom he was so proud that she need not have been jealous of Mrs. Knipp.

In the chancel lies Sir Walter Raleigh, buried in St. Margaret's after his execution in front of Westminster Palace in 1618. Admiral Blake lies in the churchyard, and there is a fine window in his honour on the north side.

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