Chapter 10

In the year 1698 this, the third chapter in the life of the Hospital, was closed. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Somers, held in that year a Visitation of the Hospital, the result of which is interesting, because it shows, first, a lingering of the old ecclesiastical traditions, and, next, the sense that something useful ought to be done with the income of the Hospital. It was therefore ordered in the new regulations provided by the Chancellor that the Brothers should be in Holy Orders, and that a school of thirty-five boys and fifteen girls should be maintained by the Hospital. It does not appear that any duties were expected of the Brothers. Like the Fellows of colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, they were all to be in priests' orders, and for exactly the same reason, because at the original foundations of the colleges, as well as of the Hospital, the Fellows were all priests. As for the Master, he remained a layman. This new order of things, therefore, raised the position of the Brothers, and gave a new dignity to the Hospital; further, the School as well as the Bedeswomen defined its position as a charity. It still fell far, very far, short of what it might have done, but it was not between the years 1698 and 1825 quite so useless as it had been. A plan of the Precinct, with drawings of the church, within and without, and of the monuments in the church, may be found in Lysons. The obscurity of the Hospital, and the neglect into which it fell during the last century, are shown by the small attention paid to it in the books on London of the last century, and the early years of the present century. Thus, in Harrison's 'History of London,' though nearly every church in the City and its immediate suburbs is figured, St. Katherine's is not drawn. In Strype (edition 1720) there is no drawing of St. Katherine's; in Dodsley's 'London,' 1761, it is described but not figured; and Wilkinson, in his 'Londina Illustrata,' passes it over entirely. The Hospital buildings consisted of a square, of which the north side was occupied by the Master's house, with a large garden behind, and the Master's orchard between his garden and the river; on the east and west sides were the Brothers' houses; and on the south side of the square was the church and the chapter-house. On the east of the church was the burying-ground. South of the church was the Sisters' close, with the houses occupied by the Sisters and the Bedeswomen. The old Brothers' houses were taken down and rebuilt about the year 1755, and the Master's house, an ancient building, full of carved timber-work, had also been taken down, so that in the year 1825, when the Hospital was finally destroyed, the only venerable building standing in the Precinct was the church itself. To look at the drawings of this old church and to think of the loving care with which it would have been treated had it been allowed to stand till this day, and then to consider the 'Gothic' edifice in Regent's Park, is indeed saddening. The church consisted of the nave and chancel with two aisles, built by Bishop Beckington, formerly the Master. The east window, 30 feet high and 25 feet wide, had once been most beautiful when its windows were stained. The tracery was still fine; a St. Katherine's wheel occupied the highest part, and beneath it was a rose; but none of the windows had preserved their painted glass, so that the general effect of the interior must have been cold. The carved wood of the stalls and the great pulpit, presented by Sir Julius Cæsar, may still be seen in the Regent's Park Chapel, where are also some of the monuments. Of these the church was full. The finest (now in Regent's Park) was that of John Holland, Duke of Exeter, and his two wives. There was one of the Hon. George Montague, Master of the Hospital, who died in the year 1681; and there was the monument with kneeling figures of one Cutting and his wife, with his coat of arms. The seats of the stalls are curiously carved, as is so often found, with grotesque figures--human birds, monkeys, lions, boys riding hogs, angels playing bagpipes, beasts with human heads, pelicans feeding their young, and the devil with hoof and horns carrying off a brace of souls. There was more than the customary wealth epitaphs. Thus, on the tablet to the memory of the daughter of one of the Brothers was written:

'Thus we by want, more than by having, learn The worth of things in which we claim concern.'

On that of William Cutting, a benefactor to Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, is written:

'Not dead, if good deedes could keep men alive, Nor all dead since good deedes do men revive. Gunville and Kaies his good deedes maie record, And will (no doubt) him praise therefor afford.'

On the tablet of Charles Stamford, clergyman:

'Mille modis morimur mortaies, nascimur uno: Sunt hominum morbi milie sed una salus.'

And to the memory of Robert Beadles, free-mason, one of His Majesty's gunners of the Tower, who died in the year 1683:

'He now rests quiet, in his grave secure; Where still the noise of guns he can endure; His martial soul is doubtless now at rest, Who in his lifetime was so oft oppressed With care and fears, and strange cross acts of late, But now is happy and in glorious state. The blustering storm of life with him is o'er, And he is landed on that happy shore Where 'tis that he can hope and fear no more.'

There they lay buried, the good people of St. Katherine's Precinct. They were of all trades, but chiefly belonged to those who go down to the sea in ships. On the list of names are those of half a dozen captains, one of them captain of H.M.S. _Monmouth_, who died in the year 1706, aged 31 years; there are the names of Lieutenants; there are those of sailmakers and gunners; there is a sergeant of Admiralty, a moneyer of the Tower, a weaver, a citizen and stationer, a Dutchman who fell overboard and was drowned, a surveyor and collector--all the trades and callings that would gather together in this little riverside district separated and cut off from the rest of London. Among the people who lived here were the descendants of them who came away with the English on the taking of Calais, Guisnes, and Hames. They settled in a street called Hames and Guisnes Lane, corrupted into Hangman's Gains. A census taken in the reign of Queen Elizabeth showed that of those resident in the Precinct, 328 were Dutch, 8 were Danes, 5 were Polanders, 69 Were French--all hat-makers--2 Spanish, 1 Italian, and 12 Scotch. Verstegan, the antiquary, was born here, and here lived Raymond Lully. During the last century the Precinct cane to be inhabited almost entirely by sailors, belonging to every nation and every religion under the sun.

This was the place which it was permitted to certain promoters of a Dock Company to destroy utterly. A place with a history of seven hundred years, which might, had its ecclesiastical character been preserved and developed, have been converted into a cathedral for East London; or, if its secular character had been maintained, might have become a noble centre of all kinds of useful work for the great chaotic city of East London. They suffered it to be destroyed. It has been destroyed for sixty years. As for calling the place in Regent's Park St. Katherine's Hospital, that, I repeat, is absurd. There is no longer a St. Katherine's Hospital. As well call the garish new building on the embankment Sion College. That is not, indeed, Sion College. The London Clergy, who, of all people, might have been expected to guard the monuments of the past, have sold Sion College for what it would fetch. The site of the Cripplegate nunnery; of Elsing's Spital for blind men; of Sion College, or Clergy House, has been destroyed by its own trustees. The sweet old place, the peacefullest spot in the whole city, with its long low library, its Bedesmen's rooms, and its quiet reading room, is gone. You might just as well destroy Trinity College, Cambridge, and then stick up a modern wing to Somerset House, and call that Trinity. In the same way St. Katherine's by the Tower was destroyed sixty years ago.

Let me repeat that the Hospital suffered four changes.

First, it was founded by Queen Matilda, for the repose of her children's souls. Next, it was dissolved and again founded, and subsequently endowed as a Religious House with chantries, certain definite duties of masses for the dead, certain charitable trusts, and other functions. Thirdly, when the Mass ceased to be said it was secularized completely. Service was held in the church, but the Hospital became a perfectly secular charity, supporting a few almspeople with niggard hand, and a Master in great splendour. Fourthly, it was again treated as a semi-ecclesiastical foundation, for reasons which do not appear. At the same time, while its charities were enlarged, no duties were assigned to the Brothers, who seem to have been considered as Fellows, forming the Society, and, therefore, like the Fellows at Oxford and Cambridge, obliged to be in Holy Orders. Lastly, as we have seen, it was destroyed.

After the Hospital had been destroyed, a scheme for the management of the revenues was suggested to Lord Elden, then Lord Chancellor, and afterwards approved by Lord Lyndhurst. The question before the Chancellor was, one would think, the following: 'Here is an annual revenue of £5,000 and more, released by the destruction of the Hospital. How can it be best applied for the general good or for the benefit of the crowded city around the site of the old Hospital?' That, however, was not the view of the Lord Chancellor. He said, practically:

'Here is a large property which has hitherto been devoted to the use of maintaining in idleness, and not as a reward or pension for good work done, a Master, three Brothers, three Sisters, and ten poor women. The ecclesiastical purposes for which the property was originally got together have long since utterly vanished. The church in which service used to be held is abolished, and the place where it stood is turned into a dock. We will build a new church where none is wanted, we will perpetuate the waste of all this money; the stipends of the Brothers and Sisters shall be raised; to the Brothers shall be assigned, nominally, the service in the chapel, but they shall have a chaplain or reader, to prevent this duty from becoming onerous; the Sisters shall have nothing at all to do; the Bedeswomen shall be deprived of their houses and shall receive no advance in their pay, but they shall be doubled in number. Twenty Bedesmen shall also be added with the same pay, viz., £10 a year, or 4s. a week.[NOTE: Note that in 1545 each Bedeswomen received 10d, a week, and each Sister 3s., so that the proportion of Bedeswoman's pay to Sister's pay was then as 1:3'6. But Lord Lyndhurst takes away the houses from the poor women and gives them no more pay, so that, without _counting the loss of their houses_, the Bedeswoman's pay under Victoria is to the Sister's pay as 1:19. The Victorian Bedeswoman was therefore relatively reduced in proportion to the Sister six-fold compared with her Tudor predecessor.] The Master shall have a beautiful house with a garden, conservancy, stabling for seven horses, and £1,200 a year, besides comfortable perquisites. He shall have no duties except the presidency of the chapter. And in order that the thing may not seem perfectly and profoundly ridiculous there shall be a school of twenty-four boys and twelve girls.'

This was the solution proposed and adopted by two eminent Chancellors, and carried into effect for thirty years. During the years 1858-1863 the average revenue was £7,460 8s. 2-3/4d. Of this sum the Master, Brethren, and Sisters absorbed with their buildings £4,102 8s. 2-3/4d.; the management expenses Were £909 5s. 6d.; the chapel cost £211 17s. 11d., sundries amounted to £141 6s. 10-3/4 d.; and the useful portion of the expenditure was represented by the sum of £554 9s. 7-1/2 d. Absolute uselessness--for the chapel was by no means wanted--is represented by £6,904, and usefulness by £554--a proportion of very nearly 12-1/2:1.

Yet another opportunity occurred of dealing rationally with this large property.

In the year 1871 a Royal Commission was appointed to examine 'into several matters relative to the Royal Hospital of St. Katherine near the Tower.' The question might again have been raised how best to apply the large revenues for the general good. The Commissioners had before them quite clearly the way in which the seven thousand and odd pounds a year was being spent; they could arrive as easily as ourselves at the proportion above set forth, viz.:

Waste : usefulness :: 12-1/2 : 1.

They threw away this opportunity; they could not tear away the ecclesiastical rags with which the new foundation of 1827--the mock St. Katherine's--has been wrapped in imitation of the old. In an age when the universities have been secularized, when the Fellows of colleges are no longer required to be in Orders, when every useless old charity is being reformed, and every endowment reconsidered with a view to making it useful to the living as, under former conditions, it was to the dead, they actually proposed to increase the uselessness and the waste by adding a fourth Brother (which has not been done), and raising the stipends of Brothers and Sisters. They also recommended the establishment of an upper school, with 'foundation boarders.' Considering that the upper and middle classes have already appropriated to their own use almost every educational endowment in the country, this proposition seems too ridiculous. The whole Report is indeed a marvellous illustration of the tenacity of old prejudices. Yet it did one good thing; it recommended that the accounts of the Hospital should be submitted every year to the Charity Commissioners, thus distinctly recognising the fact that the new foundation is not an ecclesiastical institution, but a charity.

The Report mentions several propositions which had been laid before the Commissioners during their inquiry for the application of the revenues. The Committee of the Adult Orphan Institution thought that they should like to administer the funds; the Rector of St. George's-in-the-East thought that he should very much like to use them for the purpose of converting that parish into 'a collegiate church, under a dean and canons, who, with a sisterhood, might devote themselves to the spiritual benefit, etc.'; others suggested that a missionary collegiate church should be established 'as a centre of missionary work for the East of London, with model schools, refuges, reformatories, etc., conducted by the clergy.' Others, again, pleaded for the use of the money in aid of the crowded parishes near the Precinct.

The Commissioners were of a different opinion. The Hospital, they said, never had a local character. This is the most startling statement that ever issued from the mouth of a Lord Chancellor. Not a local character? Then for whom were the services of the church held? Where were the Bedeswomen found? Where the poor scholars? Where did the church stand? Who got the doles? Not a local character? We might as well contend, for example, that Rochester Cathedral and Close and School have no local character; that Portsmouth Dockyard has no local character; that Westminster School has no local character. St. Katherine's Hospital belonged to its Precinct, where it had stood for some hundred years. As well pretend that the Tower itself has no local character. The 'local character' of St. Katherine's grew year by year: the founder thought only to make a bridge for her children from purgatory to heaven by the harmonious voices of the Master, the Brothers, and the Sisters; but purpose widens. Presently purgatory disappears, and the whole ecclesiastical part of the foundation, except service in the church, vanishes with it. There remain, however, the revenues, and these belong, if any revenues could, to the locality.

In the year 1863 the proportion of waste to profit was as 12-1/2:1. Has this proportion in the quarter of a century which has elapsed increased or has it decreased?

From time to time, as we have seen, the question forces itself upon men's minds--whether this revenue could not be administered to better advantage. Lord Somers encounters the difficulty in the year 1698; Lord Lyndhurst in 1829; Lord Hatherley in 1871. I suppose that even a Lord Chancellor does not claim infallible wisdom. Therefore I venture to insist upon the facts that the Reformation destroyed the Religious House of St. Katherine; that the changes made by Lord Somers only made the old Hospital useless; and that the Royal Commission of the year 1871 confirmed, in the new foundation, the later uselessness of the old. The House of Shams and Shadows in Regent's Park is not the old St. Katherine's at all; that is dead and done with; it is a fungus which sprang up yesterday, which is not wholesome for human food, and uses up, for no good purpose, the soil in which it grows.

Yet, because one would not be charged with unfairness, what does the Rev. Simcox Lea, in his history of St. Katherine's Hospital (Longmans, 1878), say?

'St. Katherine's Hospital is an Ecclesiastical Corporation, returned as a "Promotion Spiritual" in the reign of Henry VIII., and so acknowledged by law in the reign of Charles I. It takes its place as a Collegiate Church with Westminster and Windsor. The Clerical Head of its Chapter, the Master of the Hospital, will be entitled, unless Her Majesty shall see fit otherwise to direct, to the style of Very Reverend and the rank of Dean. The Brothers have the status and dignity of Canons Residentiary, and through the Sisters of the Chapter the parallel dignity of Canonesses is preserved, under another style, to the English Church of our day. The Collegiate Chapter holds its entire revenues subject to certain eleemosynary trusts embodied in its original constitution, the ecclesiastical and the charitable charges belonging alike to all the estates instead of being assigned separately to different portions of them.... All these principles of the constitution of St. Katherine's must be kept in view in any scheme which it may be proposed to submit, or in any suggestions which may be offered through the press, for the consideration of the Lord Chancellor in reference to the advice which he may submit to the Queen.... St. Katherine's Hospital is no more a "Charity" than Westminster Abbey is a Charity, and to describe it as such, after the true facts of the case are known, will leave any writer or speaker open to the charge of discourtesy, directly offered to a capitular body whose personal constitution is worthy of its high and ancient corporate ecclesiastical dignity, and indirectly through the members of the Chapter, to the Queen.'

It will thus be seen that those of us who think that the place is a Charity, and therefore call it one--including Lord Eldon and Lord Lyndhurst, the Report of the Charity Commissioners in 1866, and Lord Hatherley in 1871--are open to the charge of discourtesy. Well, let us remain open to that charge; it does not kill. If it is not a Charity, what is it? A place for getting the souls of rich men out of purgatory? But the souls of rich men no longer in this country have the privilege of being bought out of purgatory. Then what is it? A place where seven well-born ladies and gentlemen are provided with excellent houses and comfortable incomes--for doing what? Nothing.

Let us, if we must, offer a compromise. Let the Master, Brothers, and Sisters, now forming the Society of New St. Katherine's, remain in Regent's Park. We will not disturb them. Let them enjoy their salaries so long as they live. At their deaths let those who love shams and pretences appoint other Brothers and Sisters who will have all the dignity of the position without the houses or the salaries. We may even go so far as to provide a chaplain for the service of the chapel, if the good people of the Terraces would like those services to continue. But as for the rest of the income one cannot choose but ask--and, if the request be not granted, ask again, and again--that it be restored to that part of London to which it belongs. One would not, with the person who communicated with the Commissioners, insult East London by founding a 'Missionary' College in its midst unless it be allowed to have branches in Belgravia, Lincoln's Inn, the Temple, St. John's Wood, South Kensington, and other parts of West London; we will certainly not ask permission to turn St. George's-in-the-East into a Collegiate Church with a Dean and Canons, 'and a sisterhood.' But one must ask that the pretence and show of keeping up this ugly and useless modern place as the ancient and venerable Hospital be abandoned as soon as possible. That old Hospital is dead and destroyed; its ecclesiastical existence had been dead long before, its lands and houses and funds remain to be used for the benefit of the living.

Ten thousand pounds a year! This is a goodly estate. Think what ten thousand pounds a year might do, well administered! Think of the terrible and criminal waste in suffering all that money, which belongs to East London, to be given away--year after year--in profitless alms to ladies and gentlemen in return for no services rendered or even pretended. Ten thousand pounds a year would run a magnificent school of industrial education; it would teach thousands of lads and girls how to use their heads and hands; it would be a perennial living stream, changing the thirsty desert into flowery meads and fruitful vineyards; it would save thousands of boys from the dreadful doom--a thing of these latter days--of being able to learn no trade; it would dignify thousands, and tens of thousands, of lives with the knowledge and mastery of a craft; it would save from degradation and from slavery thousands of women; it would restrain thousands of men from the beery slums of drink and crime. Above all--perhaps this is the main consideration--the judicious employment of ten thousand pounds a year would be presently worth many millions a year to London from the skilled labour it would cultivate and the many arts it would develop and foster.

It is a cruel thing--a most cruel thing--to destroy wantonly anything that is venerable with age and associated with the memories of the past. It was a horrible thing to destroy that old Hospital. But it is gone. The house of Shams and Shadows in Regent's Park has got nothing whatever to do with it. Its revenues did not make the old Hospital; that was made up by its ancient church; by the old buildings clustered round the church; by the old customs of the Precinct, with its Courts, temporal and spiritual, its offices and its prison; by its burial-grounds, with its Bedesmen and Bedeswomen, and by the rough sailor population which dwelt in its narrow lanes and courts. How _could_ that place be allowed to suffer destruction? But when the old thing is gone we must cast about for the best uses of anything which once belonged to it. And of all the uses to which the revenues of the old Hospital might be put, the present seems the most unfit and the least worthy.