Part 17

There were other ruins. Cromwell's men were not the only zealots against popish monuments, signs, and symbols. The parish churches were filled with ruins. The carved fonts were defaced; the side chapels were desolate and empty; the altars were stripped; the rood screens were removed; the roods themselves were taken down; the painted walls were whitewashed; the simple service that was read in the vulgar tongue seemed to the people at first a ruin of the old mass; the clergyman, called minister or priest, who preached in the black gown, was a ruin of the priest in his gorgeous robes; the very doctrines of the Protestant faith seemed at first built out of the ruins of the old, as the second Temple was built upon the ruins of the first, and was but a poor thing in comparison. At first only, because the work was thorough, and in a single generation all the traditions of the ancient faith were lost and forgotten.

If, indeed, the Reformation was to be carried at all, it was necessary, for the prevention of civil war, that it should be thorough. Therefore the young generation must be made to believe that a return of the old things was absolutely impossible; that the old religion could never, under any circumstances, be revived. When Queen Mary ascended the throne, the work was only half done; the Protestant faith had not yet taken root; yet when she died, five years later, no lamentations were made over the second departure of the priests. It is a commonplace that the flames of Smithfield, more than the preaching of Latimer, reconciled the people to the loss of the old religion. I do not think that the commonplace is more than half true, because the flames were again kindled, and more than once, in the reign of Elizabeth without any murmur from the people. Henceforth the old religion was dead indeed, and impossible to be revived. When Shakespeare came up to London, he found many who could remember the monks--gray, white, and black; the Franciscan--innocent of the old simplicity; the rich and stately Benedictine; the austere Dominican; the pardoner and the limitour; the mass, and the holy days of the Church; but we find in Shakespeare's writings no trace of any regret for their disappearance, or of any desire for their return. The past was gone; even the poetic side of a highly poetic time was not touched, or hardly touched, by the sadness and pathos of this great fall; the dramatists and poets have made nothing out of it.

The people lived among the ruins but regarded them not, any more than the vigorous growth within the court of a roofless Norman castle regards the donjon and the walls. They did not inquire into the history of the ruins; they did not want to preserve them; they took away the stones and sold them for new buildings.

It was very remarkable and very fitting that on the site of the Grey Friars' House should be erected a great school. The teaching of the new thought was established in the place where those dwelt who had been the most stalwart defenders of the old. It was also very remarkable and very fitting that within the walls of Black Friars' Abbey, the home of austerity and authority, should rise a play-house for the dramas of free thought and human passion. It was further remarkable and very fitting that the house of the Carthusian monks, those who had fled from the work, and war, and temptations of the world, those who, while yet living, were already dead, should be converted into a home for those who were broken down and spent with that very work and war, a place where they could meditate in their old age over the storm and struggle of the past.

Once arrived at the second half of the sixteenth century we are in modern times. We have maps, surveys, descriptions of the city; we have literature in plenty to illustrate the manners of the time. There is no longer any doubt upon any point. The daily life of London under Elizabeth and the first James may be learned in all its details, by any one who will take the trouble to read, as easily as the daily life in our own time. Perhaps more easily, because things which are so trivial and yet mean so much are passed over or taken for granted in the literature of our day. But let no one be content with reading the modern books upon the Elizabethan period. They contain a great deal, but the literature of the time itself is a storehouse, into which every one who wishes, however lightly, to study the time should look for himself. And it is a storehouse so full that no man can hope to exhaust though he could carry out of it load upon load of treasure.

Before me hangs a fac-simile of the map made by Ralph Agas. "Civitas Londinium." One remarks first, that the part lying south of Chepe is still the most crowded, yet not so crowded that there are no open spaces. Between Size Lane, for instance, and Walbrook is a great garden. Behind Whittington College is a large open court, which was also certainly a garden. There are gardens in Blackfriars of which the only remains at the present day are the pretty little square called Wardrobe Court and the tiny garden--I believe there is still one other garden left--at the back of the rectory of St. Andrew's. North of Chepe the streets are wider, and the open spaces larger and more frequent. At Grey Friars, already the Bluecoat School, the courts of the monastery are yet standing with the church, and the great garden still stretches unto the city wall; in the corner of the wall, where is now Monkwell Street, with Barber Surgeon's Hall, is a fine large garden. On either side of Coleman Street there are very extensive gardens; those on the west belonged to the Augustine Friars, the last remnant of which, the Drapers' Garden, was built over a few years ago to the enrichment of the Company and the loss of the city. Some part of the gardens of the Holy Trinity Priory remain. There are gardens and trees and an open space within Aldgate; and an open court, or series of courts, where had been the nunnery of St. Helen's. Without the walls, on the east, East Smithfield is a large field, with paths across. The sites of New Abbey and the convent of the Clare Sisters are marked by courts and gardens. Houses stand north and south along the Whitechapel Road, but not far; a single row of houses runs along Hound's ditch from Aldgate to Bishopsgate. Without the latter there is a line of houses as far as Shoreditch Church, and here the open country begins. Finsbury and Moorfields are to a great extent divided up into gardens, each with its house, reminding one of Stubbes's complaint against the citizens' wives and daughters, that they use their husbands' gardens outside the walls for purposes of intrigue. All round the north and east of the city the people could step out of the gates into the country. Except the houses of Bishopsgate Without and the Whitechapel Road, there was nothing but fields and open ground. Around St. Giles, Cripplegate, however, we find a suburb already populous. About Smithfield the houses gather thickly. We observe the familiar names of Little Britain, Pye Corner, Cock Lane, and Hoosier Lane. Holborn, with gardens on the north, has a double line of houses as far as Chancery Lane. Where is now Blackfriars Bridge Road stood the palace of Bridewell, with its two square courts and its gabled front facing the river. Whitefriars is partly built upon, but some of the courts and gardens remain. The lawns of the Temple, planted with elms, slope down to the river, and these were followed westward by the palaces along the Strand--Exeter House, Arundel House, the Bishop of Llandaff's house, Somerset House, the Savoy, Bedford House, Cecil House, Northumberland House, and the rest, of which Somerset House alone remains, and that in altered guise. There are no docks as yet. The lading and the unlading of the ships continued almost until this century to be done in the Pool below London Bridge by barges and lighters.

In considering the people of London in the time of good Queen Bess one is forced to put the poets and dramatists first, because they are the chief glory of this wonderful reign. Yet such a harvest could only spring from a fruitful soil. Of such temper as were the poets, so also--so courageous, so hopeful, so confident--were the inarticulate mass for whom they sang and spoke. Behind Kit Marlowe, Greene, and Peele were the turbulent youth, prodigal of life, eager for joy, delighting in feast and song, always ready for a fight, extravagant in speech and thought, jubilant in their freedom from the tyranny of the Church. Behind Spenser and Sydney were the cultivated class, whose culture has never been surpassed. Behind Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Massenger, and Beaumont, and the rest were the people of all conditions, from Gloriana herself down to Bardolph and Doll. We can only get at the people through those who write about them. Therefore we must needs say something about the Elizabethan poets.

Fortunately there are plenty of them. In proportion to the population, far, very far more than we have even at the present day, when every year the reviews find it necessary to cry out over the increasing tide of new books. Of poets, in what other age could the historian enumerate forty of the higher and nearly two hundred of the lower rank? Of the forty, most are well remembered and read even to the present day; for instance, Chapman, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Robert Greene, Marston, Sackville, Sylvester, Donne, Drayton, Drummond, Gascoigne, Marlowe, Raleigh, Spenser, Wither, may be taken as poets still read and loved, while the list does not include Shakespeare and the dramatists. Nearly two hundred and forty poets! Why, with a population of a hundred millions of English-speaking people now in the world, we have not a half or a sixth of that number, while in the same proportion we should have to equal in number the Elizabethan singers--about 5000. But in that age every gentleman wrote verse; the cultivation of poetry was like the cultivation of music. Every man could play an instrument; every man could take his part in a glee or madrigal; so, also, every man could turn his set of verses, with the result of a fine and perfect flower of poetry which has never been surpassed.

But they were not only poets. They had every kind of literature in far greater abundance, considering the small number of educated people, than exists in our own time, and in as great variety. Consider! There are now scattered over the whole world a hundred millions of English-speaking people, of whom at least five-sixths read something, if it is only a penny newspaper, and at least a half read books of some kind. In Elizabeth's reign there were about six millions, of whom more than half could not read at all. The reading public of Great Britain and Ireland, considered with regard to numbers, resembled what is now found in Holland, Norway, or Denmark. Yet from so small a people came this mass of literature, great, varied, and immortal.

In the matter of fiction alone they were already rich. There were knightly books: the _Morte d'Arthur_, the _Seven Champions_, _Amadis of Gaul_, _Godfrey of Bouillon_, _Palmerin of England_, and many more. There were story-books, as the _Seven Wise Masters_, the _Gesta Romanorum_, the _Amorous Fiammetta_, the jest books of Skogin, Tarleton, Hobson, Skelton, Peele, and others. There was the famous _Euphues_, Sidney's _Arcadia_, all the pastoral romances, and the "picaresque" novels of Nash and Dekker. Then there were the historians and chroniclers, as Stow, Camden, Speed, Holinshed; the essayists, as Sir Thomas Browne, Ascham, Bacon; the theologians, of whom there were hundreds; the satirists, as Bishop Hall and Marston; the writers of what we should call light literature--Greene, Nash, Peele, and Dekker. And there were translations, as from the Italian, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Biondello, Tasso, and others; from the French, Froissart, Montaigne, Plutarch (Amyot), the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ (in the _Hundred Merry Tales_), and the stories of the _Forest_ and the _Palace of Pleasure_. And there were all the dramatists. Never before or since has the country been better supplied with new literature and good books.

Remember, again, everything was new. All the books were new; the printing-press was new; you could almost count the volumes that had been issued. It was reckoned a great thing for Dr. Dee to have three thousand printed books. Every scholar found a classic which had not been translated, and took him in hand. Every traveller brought home some modern writer, chiefly Italian, previously unknown. Every sailor brought home the record of a voyage to unknown seas and to unknown shores. It was a time when the world had become suddenly conscious of a vast, an inconceivable widening, the results of which could not yet be foretold. But the knowledge filled men with such hopes as had never before been experienced. Scholars and poets, merchants and sailors, rovers and adventurers, all alike were moved by the passion and ecstasy of the time. Strange time! Wonderful time! We who read the history of that time too often confine our attention to the political history. We are able, with the help of Froude, quite clearly to understand the perplexities and troubles of the Maiden Queen; we see her, in her anxiety, playing off Spaniard against Frenchman, to avoid destruction should they act together. But the people know and suspect none of these things. State affairs are too high for them. They only see the brightness of the sky and the promise of the day; they only feel the quickening influence of the spring; their blood is fired; they have got new hopes, a new faith, new openings, new learning. And they bear themselves accordingly. That is to say, with extravagances innumerable, with confidence and courage lofty, unexampled. Why, it fires the blood of this degenerate time only to think of the mighty enlargement of that time. When one considers when they lived and what they talked, one understands Kit Marlowe and Robert Greene, and that wild company of scholars and poets; they would cram into whatever narrow span of life was granted them all--all--all--that life can give of learning and poetry, and feasting and love and joy. They were intoxicated with the ideas of their time. They were weighed down with the sheaves--the golden harvest of that wondrous reaping. Who would not live in such a time? The little world had become, almost suddenly, very large, inconceivably large. The boys of London, playing about the river stairs and the quays, listened to the talk of men who had sailed along those newly-discovered coasts of the new great world, and had seen strange monsters and wild people. In the taverns men--bearded, bronzed, scarred--grave men, with deep eyes and low voice, who had sailed to the Guinea coast, round the Cape to Hindostan, across the Spanish Main, over the ocean to Virginia, sat in the tavern and told to youths with flushed cheeks and panting, eager breath queer tales of danger and escape between their cups of sack. We were not yet advanced beyond believing in the Ethiopian with four eyes, the Arimaspi with one eye, the Hippopodes or Centaurs, the Monopoli, or men who have no head, but carry their faces in their breasts and their eyes in their shoulders. None of these monsters, it is true, had ever been caught and brought home; but many an honest fellow, if hard pressed by his hearers, would reluctantly confess to having seen them. On the other hand, negroes and red Indians were frequently brought home and exhibited. And there were crocodiles, alive or stuffed; crocodiles' skins, the skins of bears and lions, monkeys, parrots, flying-fish dried, and other curious things. And there were always the legends--that of the land of gold, the Eldorado; that of the kingdom of Prester John; that of St. Brandan's Island; and, but this was later, the theory--proved with mathematical certainty--of the great southern continent. Enough, and more than enough, to inflame the imagination of adventurers, to drive the lads aboard ship, to make them long for the sails to be spread and to be making their way anywhere--anywhere--in search of adventure, conquest, glory, and gold.

Such an enlargement, such hopes, can never again return to the world. That is impossible, save on one chance. We cannot make the world any wider; by this time we know it nearly all; the pristine mystery--the awfulness of the unknown--has wellnigh gone out of every land, even New Guinea and Central Africa. Yet there is this one chance. Science may and will widen the world--for her own disciples--in many new and unexpected ways. The sluggish imagination of the majority is little touched even by such marvels as the electric telegraph, the phonograph, the telephone. For them science in any form cannot enlarge their boundaries. Suppose, however, a thing to be achieved which should go right home to the comprehension, brain, and heart of every living man. Suppose that science should prevent, conquer, and annihilate disease. Suppose our span of life enlarged to two hundred, three hundred, five hundred years, and that suddenly. Think of the wild exaltations, the extravagances, the prodigalities, the omnivorous attempts of the scholar, the universal grasp of the physicist, the amazing and audacious experiments of chemist, electrician, biologist, and the long reach of the statesman! Think of these things, I say, and remember that in the age of Elizabeth, of Raleigh, Drake, Marlowe, Nash, Greene, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Spenser, Bacon, and the rest similar causes produced similar effects.

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We have seen the development of the mediæval house from the simple common hall. The Elizabethan house shows an immense advance in architecture. I believe that the noblest specimen now remaining is Burghley House in Northamptonshire, built by Cecil, Lord Burghley and first Earl of Exeter. The house is built about a square court. The west front has a lofty square tower. Let us, with Burghley House before us, read what Bacon directs as to building. The front, he says, must have a tower, with a wing on either side. That on the right was to consist of nothing but a "goodly room of some forty feet high"--he does not give the length--"and under it a room for dressing or preparing place at times of triumphs." By triumphs he means pageants, mummings, and masques. "On the other side, which is the household side, I wish it divided at the first into a hall and a chapel (with a partition between), both of good state and bigness. And these not to go all the length, but to have at the further end a winter and a summer parlor, both fair." Here are to be the cellars, kitchens, butteries, and pantries. "Beyond this front is to be a fair court, but three sides of it of a far lower building than the front. And in all the four corners of the court fair staircases, cast into turrets on the outside, and not within the row of buildings themselves.... Let the court not be paved, for that striketh up a great heat in summer and much cold in winter. But only some side alleys with a cross, and the quarters to graze being kept shorn, but not too near shorn." Stately galleries with colored windows are to run along the banquet side; on the household side, "chambers of presence and ordinary entertainments, with bedchambers." Beyond this court is to be a second of the same square, with a garden and a cloister. Other directions he gives which, if they were carried out, would make a very fine house indeed. But these we may pass over. In short, Bacon's idea of a good house was much like a college. That of Clare, Cambridge, for instance, would have been considered by Bacon as a very good house indeed, though the arrangement of the banqueting-room was not exactly as the philosopher would have it. The College of Christ's in its old form, with the garden square beyond, was still more after the manner recommended by Bacon.

It will be seen that we are now a good way removed from the Saxon Hall with the people sleeping on the floor, yet Bacon's house lineally descends from that beginning. All the old houses in London were built in this way, as may be illustrated by many which retain the old form, as well as by those which remain. Hampton Court, for instance, built by Wolsey; Northumberland House, recently taken down; Gresham House, taken down a hundred years ago; Somerset House, still standing, though much altered; the old Navy Office, the court of which still remains; some of the old almshouses, notably Trinity Almshouse, in the Whitechapel Road; Emanuel, Westminster; and the Norfolk Hospital, Greenwich, Gray's Inn, Clifford's Inn, Staple Inn, Barnard's Inn--which contains the oldest house in London--are admirable specimens of Bacon's house; while in the old taverns, of which a few imperfect specimens still exist, we have the galleries which Bacon would construct within his court.

In the reign of Elizabeth, while the merchants were growing richer and increasing in number and in wealth, the great nobles were gradually leaving the city. Those who remained kept up but a remnant of their former splendor. Elizabeth refused license for the immense number of retainers formerly allowed; she would suffer a hundred at the most. It was a time rather for the rise of new families than the continued greatness of the old. The nobles, as they went away, sold their London houses to the citizens. Thus Winchester House and Crosby Hall went to merchants; Derby House to the College of Heralds; Cold Harbor was pulled down in 1590, and its site built over with tenements; the Duke of Norfolk's house, on the site of Holy Trinity Priory, was shortly after destroyed, and the place assigned to the newly-arrived colony of Jews. Barnard's Castle alone among the city palaces remained in the possession of a great noble until the fire came and swept it away.

Great beyond all precedent was the advance of trade in this golden age. Elizabeth was wise and wisely advised in the treatment of the City and the merchants. Perhaps she followed the example of King Edward the Fourth. Perhaps she remembered (but this I doubt) that she belonged to the City by her mother's side, for her great-grandfather, Sir Geoffrey Boleyn, had been Lord Mayor a hundred years before her accession. But the rapid growth of London trade seems to me chiefly due to the wisdom of one man--Sir Thomas Gresham.

This great man, even more than Whittington, is the typical London merchant. Not a self-made man at all, but coming of a good old country stock--always a master, always of the class which commands. Nearly all the great London merchants have, as has already been stated, belonged to that class. His family came originally from Gresham, in Norfolk; his father, Sir Richard, was Lord Mayor; his uncle, Sir John, also Lord Mayor, saved Bethlehem Hospital at the dissolution of the religious houses. Not a poor and friendless lad, by any means; from the outset he had every advantage that wealth and station can afford. He was educated at Gonville (afterwards Gonville and Caius) College, Cambridge. It was not until he had taken his degree that he was apprenticed to his uncle, and he was past twenty-four when he was received into the Mercers' Company.