Chapter 15

Here, Shakespeare rose up and stood massively blocking the perspective of our patriotic researches, and blotting out all minor memories. But if this was a hardship it was one which constantly waits upon the sympathetic American in England. It is really easier to stay at home, and make your inquiries in that large air where the objects of your interest are placed at ample intervals, than to visit the actual scene where you will find them crowding and elbowing one another, and perhaps treading down and pushing back others of equal import which you had not in mind. England has so long been breeding greatness of all kinds, and her visionary children press so thick about her knees, that you cannot well single one specially out when you come close; it is only at a distance that you can train your equatorial upon any certain star, and study it at your ease. This tremendous old woman who lives in a shoe so many sizes too small more than halves with her guests her despair in the multitude of her offspring, and it is best to visit her in fancy if you wish their several acquaintance. There at Bankside was not only Shakespeare suddenly filling that place and extending his vast shadow over the region we had so troublesomely passed through, but now another embarrassment of riches attended us. We were going to visit St. Saviour's Church, because John Harvard, the son of a butcher in that parish was baptized in it, long before he could have dreamed of Emanuel College at Cambridge, or its outwandering scholars could have dreamed of naming after him another college in another Cambridge in another world. Our way lay through the Borough Market, which is for Southwark in fruits and vegetables, and much more in refuse and offal, what Covent Garden Market is for the London beyond Thames; and then through a wide troubled street, loud with coming and going at some railway station. Here we suddenly dropped into a silent and secluded place, and found ourselves at the door of St. Saviour's. Outside it has been pitilessly restored in a later English version of the Early English in which it was built, and it has that peculiarly offensive hardness which such feats of masonry seem to put on defiantly; but within much of the original architectural beauty lingers, especially in the choir and Lady Chapel. We were not there for that beauty, however, but for John Harvard's sake; yet no sooner were we fairly inside the church than our thoughts were rapt from him to such clearer fames as those of Philip Massinger, the dramatist; Edmund Shakespeare, the great Shakespeare's younger brother; John Fletcher, of the poetic firm of Beaumont and Fletcher; the poet Edward Dyer; and yet again the poet John Gower, the “moral Gower” who so insufficiently filled the long gap between Chaucer and Spencer, and who rests here with a monument and a painted effigy over him. Besides these there are so many actors buried in it that the church is full of the theatre, and it might well dispute with our own Little Church Round the Corner, the honor of mothering the outcast of other sanctuaries; though it rather more welcomes them in their funeral than their nuptial rites. Among the tablets and effigies there was none of John Harvard in St. Saviour's, and we were almost a year too early for the painted window which now commemorates him.

One might leave Southwark rather glad to be out of it, for in spite of its patriotic and poetic associations it is a quarter where the scrupulous house-keeping of London seems for once to fail. In such streets as we passed through, and I dare say they were not the best, the broom and the brush and the dust-pan strive in vain against the dirt that seems to rise out of the ground and fall from the clouds. But many people live there, and London Bridge, by which we crossed, was full of clerks and shop-girls going home to Southwark; for it was one o'clock on a Saturday, and they were profiting by the early closing which shuts the stores of London so inexorably at that hour on that day. We made our way through them to the parapet for a final look at that stretch of the Thames where Cromwell as unwillingly as unwittingly perhaps stepped ashore to come into a kingdom.

[Footnote: While the reader is sharing our emotion in the scene of the problematical event, I think it a good time to tell him that the knowledge of which I have been and expect to be so profuse in these researches, is none of mine, except as I have cheaply possessed myself of it from the wonderful hand-book of Peter Cunningham, which Murray used to publish as his guide to London, and which unhappily no one publishes now. It is a bulky volume of near six hundred pages, crammed with facts more delightful than any fancies, and its riches were supplemented for me by the specific erudition of my friend, the genealogist, Mr. Lothrop Withington, who accompanied my wanderings, and who endorses all my statements. The reader who doubts them (as I sometimes do) may recur to him at the British Museum with the proper reproaches if they prove mistaken.]

We were going from St. Saviour's in Southwark where Harvard was baptized to St. Catherine Cree in the city where Sir Nicholas Throgmorton's effigy lies in the chancel, and somewhat distantly relates itself to our history through his daughter's elopement with Sir Walter Raleigh. But now for a mere pleasure, whose wantonness I shall not know how to excuse to the duteous reader, we turned aside to the church of St. Magnus at the end of the bridge, and I shall always rejoice that we did so, for there I made the acquaintance of three of the most admirable cats in London. One curled herself round the base of a pillar of the portico, which was formerly the public thoroughfare to London Bridge; another basked in the pretty garden which now encloses the portico, and let the shifting shadows of the young sycamores flicker over her velvet flank; the third arched a majestic back and rubbed against our legs in accompanying us into the church. There was not much for us to see there, and perhaps the cat was tired of knowing that the church was built by Wren, after the great fire, and has a cupola and lantern thought to be uncommonly fine. Certainly it did not seem to share my interest in the tablet to Miles Coverdale, once rector of St. Magnus and bishop of Exeter, at which I started, not so much because he had directed the publication of the first complete version of the English Bible, as because he had borne the name of a chief character in _The Blithedale Romance_. I am afraid that if the cat could have supposed me to be occupied with such a trivial matter it would not have purred so civilly at parting, and I should not have known how to justify myself by explaining that the church of St. Magnus was more illustriously connected with America through that coincidence than many more historical scenes.

The early closing had already prevailed so largely in the city, that most of the churches were shut, and we were not aware of having got into St. Catherine Cree's at the time we actually did so. We were grateful for getting into any church, but we looked about us too carelessly to identify the effigy of Sir Nicholas, who was, after all, only a sort of involuntary father-in-law of Virginia. That was what we said to console ourselves afterwards; but now, since we were, however unwittingly, there, I feel that I have some right to remind the reader that our enemy (so far as we are of Puritan descent) Archbishop Laud consecrated the church with ceremonies of such high ecclesiastical character that his part in them was alleged against him, and did something to bring him to the block. That Inigo Jones is said to have helped in designing the church, and that the great Holbein is believed to be buried in it, and would have had a monument there if the Earl of Arundel could have found his bones to put it over, are sufficiently irrelevant details.

The reader sees how honest I am trying to be with him, and I will not conceal from him that Duke Street, down a stretch of which I looked, because the wife of Elder Brewster of Plymouth Colony was born and bred there, was as dull a perspective of mean modern houses as any in London. It was distinctly a relief, after paying this duty, to pass, in Leadenhall Street, the stately bulk of India House, and think of the former occupying the site, from which Charles Lamb used to go early in compensation for coming so late to his work there. It was still better when, by an accident happier than that which befell us at St. Catherine Cree's, we unexpectedly entered by a quaint nook from Bishopsgate Street to the church of St. Ethelburga, which has a claim to the New-Yorker's interest from the picturesque fact that Henry Hudson and his ship's company made their communion in it the night before he sailed away to give his name to the lordliest, if not the longest of our rivers, and to help the Dutch found the Tammany régime, which still flourishes at the Hudson's mouth. The comprehensive Cunningham makes no mention of the fact, but I do not know why my genealogist should have had the misgiving which he expressed within the overhearing of the eager pew-opener attending us. She promptly set him right. “Oh, 'e did _mike_ it 'ere, sir. They've been and searched the records,” she said, so that the reader now has it on the best authority.

I wish I could share with him, as easily as this assurance, the sentiment of the quaint place, with its traces of Early English architecture, and its look of being chopped in two; its intense quiet and remoteness in the heart of the city, with the slop-pail of its pew-opener mingling a cleansing odor with the ancient smells which pervade all old churches. But these things are of the nerves and may not be imparted, though they may be intimated. As rich in its way as the sentiment of St. Ethelburga was that of the quiescing streets of the city, that pleasant afternoon, with their shops closed or closing, and the crowds thinned or thinning in their footways and wheelways, so that we got from point to point in our desultory progress, incommoded only by other associations that rivalled those we had more specifically in mind. History, of people and of princes, finance, literature, the arts of every kind, were the phantoms that started up from the stones and the blocks of the wood-pavement and followed or fled before us at every step. As I have already tried to express, it is always the same story. London is too full of interest, and when I thought how I could have gone over as much ground in New York without anything to distract me from what I had in view, I felt the pressure of those thick London facts almost to suffocation. Nothing but my denser ignorance saved me from their density, as I hurried with my friend through air that any ignorance less dense would have found impassable with memories.

As it was I could draw a full breath unmolested only when we dropped down a narrow way from Bishopsgate Street to the sequestered place before the church of the Dutch refugees from papal persecutions in France and the Netherlands. Here was formerly the church of the Augustine Friars, whose community Henry VIII. dissolved, and whose church his son Edward VI. gave to the “Germans” as he calls the Hollanders in his boyish diary. It was to our purpose as one of the beginnings of New York, for it is said that New Amsterdam was first imagined by the exiles who worshipped in it, and who planned the expedition of Henry Hudson from it. Besides this historic or mythic claim, it had for me the more strictly human interest of the sign-board in Dutch, renewed from the earliest time, at both its doorways, notifying its expatriated congregation that all letters and parcels would be received there for them; this somehow intimated that the refugees could not have found it spiritually much farther to extend their exile half round the world. Cunningham says that “the church contains some very good decorated windows, and will repay examination,” but, like the early-closing shops all round it, the Dutch church was shut that Saturday afternoon, and we had to come away contenting ourselves as we could with the Gothic, fair if rather too freshly restored, of the outside. I can therefore impartially commend the exterior to our Knickerbocker travellers, but they will readily find the church in the rear of the Bank of England, after cashing their drafts there, and judge for themselves.

Philadelphians of Quaker descent will like better to follow my friend with me up Cheapside, past the Bowbells which ring so sweet and clear in literature, and through Holborn to Newgate which was one of the several prisons of William Penn. He did not go to it without making it so hard for the magistrates trying him and his fellow-Quakers for street-preaching that they were forced to over-ride his law and logic, and send him to jail in spite of the jury's verdict of acquittal; such things could then be easily done. In self-justification they committed the jury along with the prisoners; that made a very perfect case for their worships, as the reader can find edifyingly and a little amusingly set forth in Maria Webb's story of _The Penns and the Penningtons_. As is known, the persecution of Penn wellnigh converted his father, the stiff old admiral, who now wrote to him in Newgate: “Son William, if you and your friends keep to your plain way of preaching, and your plain way of living, you will make an end of the priests to the end of the world ... Live in love. Shun all manner of evil, and I pray God to bless you all; and He will bless you.”

Little of the old Newgate where Penn lay imprisoned is left; a spic-and-span new Newgate, still in process of building, replaces it, but there is enough left for a monument to him who was brave in such a different way from his brave father, and was great far beyond the worldly greatness which the admiral hoped his comely, courtly son would achieve. It was in Newgate, when he was cast there the second time in three months, that he wrote _The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience_, and three minor treatises. He addressed from the same prison a letter to Parliament explaining the principles of Quakerism, and he protested to the sheriff of London against the cruelties practised by the jailors of Newgate on prisoners too poor to buy their favor. He who was rich and well-born preferred to suffer with these humble victims; and probably his oppressors were as glad to be rid of him in the end as he of them.

One may follow Penn (though we did not always follow him to all, that Saturday afternoon), to many other places in London: to the Tower, where he was imprisoned on the droll charge of “blasphemy,” within stone's throw of All Hallow's Barking, where he was christened; to Grace Church Street, where he was arrested for preaching; to Lincoln's Inn, where he had chambers in his worldlier days; to Tower Street, where he went to school; to the Fleet, where he once lived within the “rules” of the prison; to Norfolk Street, where he dwelt awhile almost in hiding from the creditors who were pressing him, probably for the public debt of Pennsylvania.

We followed him only to Newgate, whence we visited the church of St. Sepulchre hard by, and vainly attempted to enter, because Roger Williams was christened there, and so connected it with the coming of toleration into the world, as well as with the history of the minute province of Rhode Island, which his spirit so boundlessly enlarged. We failed equally of any satisfactory effect from Little St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, possibly because the Place was demolished a hundred and five years before, and because my friend could not quite make out which neighboring street it was where the mother of the Wesleys was born. But we did what we could with the shield of the United States Consulate-General in the Place, and in an adjoining court we had occasion for seriousness in the capers of a tipsy Frenchman, who had found some boys playing at soldiers, and was teaching them in his own tongue from apparently vague recollections of the manual of arms. I do not insist that we profited by the occasion; I only say that life likes a motley wear, and that he who rejects the antic aspects it so often inappropriately puts on is no true photographer.

After all, we did not find just the street, much less the house, in which Susannah Annesley had lived before she was Mrs. Wesley, and long before her sons had imagined Methodism, and the greater of them had borne its message to General Oglethorpe's new colony of Georgia. She lies in Bunhill Fields near Finsbury Square, that place sacred to so many varying memories, but chiefly those of the Dissenters who leased it, because they would not have the service from the book of Common Prayer read over them. There her dust mingles with that of John Bunyan, of Daniel de Foe, of Isaac Watts, of William Blake, of Thomas Stothard, and a multitude of nameless or of most namable others. The English crowd one another no less under than above the ground, and their island is as historically as actually over-populated. As I have expressed before, you can scarcely venture into the past anywhere for a certain association without being importuned by a score of others as interesting or more so. I have, for instance, been hesitating to say that the ancestor of Susannah was the Reverend Samuel Annesley who was silenced for his Puritanism in his church of St. Giles Cripplegate, because I should have to confess that when I visited his church my thoughts were rapt from the Reverend Samuel and from Susannah Annesley, and John Wesley, and the Georgian Methodists to the far mightier fame of Milton, who lies interred there, with his father before him, with John Fox, author of _The Book of Martyrs_, with Sir Martin Frobisher, who sailed the western seas when they were yet mysteries, with Margaret Lucy, the daughter of Shakespeare's Sir Thomas. There, too, Cromwell was married, when a youth of twenty-one, to Elizabeth Bowchier. Again, I have had to ask myself, what is the use of painfully following up the slender threads afterwards woven into the web of American nationality, when at any moment the clews may drop from your heedless hands in your wonder at some which are the woof of the history of the world? I have to own even here that the more storied dead in Bunhill Fields made me forget that there lay among them Nathaniel Mather of the kindred of Increase and Cotton.

That is a place which one must wish to visit not once, but often, and I hope that if I send any reader of mine to it he will fare better than we did, and not find it shut to the public on a Sunday morning when it ought to have been open. But the Sabbatarian observances of England are quite past the comprehension of even such semi-aliens as the Americans, and must baffle entire foreigners all but to madness. I had already seen the Sunday auctions of the poor Jews in Petticoat Lane, which are licit, if not legal, and that Sunday morning before we found Bunhill Fields fast closed, we had found a market for poor Christians wide open in Whitecross Street near by. It was one of several markets of the kind which begin early Saturday evening, and are suffered by a much-winking police to carry on their traffic through the night and till noon the next day. Then, at the hour when the Continental Sunday changes from a holy day to a holiday, the guardians of the public morals in London begin to urge the hucksters and their customers to have done with their bargaining, and get about remembering the Sabbath-day. If neither persuasions nor imperatives will prevail, it is said that the police sometimes call in the firemen and rake the marketplace with volleys from the engine-hose. This is doubtless effective, but at the hour when we passed through as much of Whitecross Street as eyes and nose could bear, it was still far from the time for such an extreme measure, and the market was flourishing as if it were there to stay indefinitely.

Everything immediately imaginable for the outside or inside of man seemed on sale: clothing of all kinds, boots and shoes, hats and caps, glassware, iron-ware; fruits and vegetables, heaps of unripe English hazelnuts, and heaps of Spanish grapes which had failed to ripen on the way; fish, salt and fresh, and equally smelling to heaven; but, above all, flesh meats of every beast of the field and every bird of the barnyard, with great girls hewing and hacking at the carnage, and strewing the ground under their stands with hoofs and hides and claws and feathers and other less namable refuse. There was a notable absence among the hucksters of that coster class which I used to see in London twenty odd years before, or at least an absence of the swarming buttons on jackets and trousers which used to distinguish the coster. But among the customers, whose number all but forbade our passage through the street, with the noise of their feet and voices, there were, far beyond counting, those short, stubbed girls and women as typically cockney still as the costers ever were. They were of a plinth-like bigness up and down, and their kind, plain, common faces were all topped with narrow-brimmed sailor-hats, mostly black. In their jargoning hardly an aspirate was in its right place, but they looked as if their hearts were, and if no word came from their lips with its true quality, but with that curious soft London slur or twist, they doubtless spoke a sound business dialect.

When we traversed the dense body of the market and entered Roscoe Street from Whitecross, we were surprisingly soon out of its hubbub in a quiet befitting the silent sectaries, who once made so great a spiritual clamor in the world. We were going to look at the grave of George Fox, because of his relation to our colonial history in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and we thought it well to look into the Friends' Meeting-house on the way, for a more fitting frame of mind than we might have brought with us from Whitecross Street. A mute sexton welcomed us at the door, and held back for us the curtain of the homely quadrangular interior, where we found twoscore or more of such simple folk as Fox might have preached to in just such a place. The only difference was that they now wore artless versions of the world's present fashions in dress, and not the drabs of out-dated cut which we associate with Quakerism. But this was right, for that dress is only the antiquated simplicity of the time when Quakerism began; and the people we now saw were more fitly dressed than if they had worn it. We sat with them a quarter of an hour in the stillness which no one broke, the elders on the platform, with their brows bowed on their hands, apparently more deeply lost in it than the rest. Then we had freedom (to use their gentle Quaker parlance) to depart, and I hope we did so without offence.

Cunningham says that Fox was buried in Bunhill Fields, but he owns there is no memorial of him there; and there is a stone to mark his grave in the grassy space just beyond the meeting-house in Roscoe Street. If that is really his last resting-place, he lies under the shadow of a certain lofty warehouse walls, and in the shelter of some trees which on that sunny First Day morning stirred in the breeze with the stiffness by which the English foliage confesses before the fall it drops sere and colorless to the ground. Some leaves had already fallen about the simple monumental stone, and now they moved inertly, and now again lay still.