CHAPTER XIX

THE CLARES

The Abbey of St. Clare, which stood on the site of the church called Holy Trinity, Minories, was founded by Blanche d’Artois in 1293. The following genealogy sufficiently explains the connection of Blanche with this country and with London:—

Robert, Comte d’Artois = Maude of Brabant │ Henri le Gros, = Blanche, = Edmund, Earl of = Adeline King of Navarre, │ b. 1250, │ Lancaster, King (1st wife) m. 1270, d. 1274. │ d. 1300. │ of Sicily, b. 1245, │ │ m. 1274, d. 1296. Jeanne │ 2nd son of = Philippe le │ Henry III., │ Bel. │ called Crouchback. ..│.. │ ┌──────┴───────────┬───────┬───────┐ │ │ │ │ Thomas, E. of Lancaster, Henry. John. Daughter. beheaded 1322.

The House was founded in 1293 for the reception of “certain nuns devoted to the service of God, St. Mary and St. Francis, expected shortly to arrive and to settle in this realm.” The first nuns were Frenchwomen, brought over by Blanche. They belonged to the Order called Clares, their name being that of St. Clare, the foundress of the Franciscan nuns, who was canonised in 1253, two years after her death. They called themselves _Sorores Minores_—as their Franciscan Friars were _Fratres Minores_; they were also called “rich Clares,” because they were allowed to possess endowments and lands; others of the same Order being “poor Clares,” who subsisted entirely on the charity of the people. They were also called Urbanists, because their rule had been revised by Pope Urban; and they were _inclusæ_, that is to say, forbidden, except by reason of pestilence, war, or fire, to go outside the convent walls.

The endowments began with three tenements and four parcels of ground near, or upon, the site of the House, together with some houses in West Chepe, yielding £30 a year.

Subsequent endowments included a large number of messuages, tenements, wharves, and shops in London and Whitechapel. It would be interesting to ascertain how much of London actually belonged to the Religious Houses.

The infant Convent received three Bulls from Pope Boniface VIII. In the first he received the House, with all its buildings and property, under his own peculiar jurisdiction. In the second he declared the House free from the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury. In the third he pronounced the House inviolable, and ordered the Bishop of London to consecrate for the nuns all the Church plate and sacred vessels.

In the reign of Edward the Second the King exempted the sisters, on account of their poverty, from all tallage payable to the Crown for their lands and houses in London.

In the reign of Edward the Third they obtained a grant of thirty marks a year, and another of twenty marks from private persons. They also obtained from Isabella, mother of Edward the Third, the advowsons of three churches, on the condition of praying for the soul of the late King. Edward the Third also endowed them with lands and houses.

The writer of a paper in _Archæologia_ enumerates many gifts of messuages, etc., made to the sisters during the two hundred and fifty years of their existence. In the _Calendar of Wills_ between 1341 and 1519, I find twenty-five bequests to this House, of which all but seven belong to the fourteenth century.

A considerable mass of ruins of the Convent House remained standing down to the end of the eighteenth century, when most of them were destroyed. In 1706 it was found that the north wall of the present church of the Holy Trinity was part of the wall of the Sisters’ Chapel; in 1793, in digging the foundations of a house, in Haydon Square, a massive stone wall was discovered, certainly part of the House, as it formed the boundary of the parish. On the west side of the Square the houses in 1803 were part of the original building, the walls being of stone, even the partitions between the rooms. In 1797 a fire, which consumed many of the houses south of the church, from the Minories to Haydon Square, eastward, laid open the remains of a Hall which seemed to be the Refectory.

Stow has the following particulars concerning this House:—

“The License for founding it bore Date 21 E. I. to the Abbess of St. Clare without Aldgate. There was a Charter granted 9 E. II. that the Sisters Minoresses without Aldgate should be quit of Tallage on account of their Lands and Tenements in the City of London. In another Charter 14 E. II. it is called the Abby of the Minoresses of St. Mary of the Order of St. Clare without the Walls of the City: In which Charter are confirmed certain Messes of theirs in the Vintry, in Wood Street, Lad Lane, Old Fish Street, and one Mess and two Shops in Lombard Street, Christ’s Church Lane, and Shirburgh Lane; gotten of divers well affected Persons: What the Charters and Liberties of these Minoresses were, may be seen by the Confirmation thereof in 1 H. V. and Anno 16 and 25 and 2 H. 4, which remain in the Tower Records. The Manour of Apeldercome was granted to the Prioress of the Minoresses without Aldgate, 1 H. IV. and 22 H. VI. A Mess called the Herteshorn, in the Parish of St. Mary Matfelon, was granted to them by Nicholas Walshe, 7 E. IV. To all the rest let this be added.

That this House was first erected to receive Nuns that were to be brought over by Blanch, Queen of Navarre, Wife to the abovesaid Earl Edmund: And they were professed to serve God, the blessed Virgin, and St. Francis; as appears by this Charter of Licence, which the said Edmund obtained of the King his Brother the 21st of his Reign.”

The House attracted and maintained the greatest respect of the citizens. This is shown by the bequests which were showered upon the sisterhood; these were continued far into the fifteenth century, long after the stream of benefactions had ceased for the other religious houses of London. It is also shown by the request of many ladies that they should be buried in the Chapel of the Nuns—among them was Elizabeth, Duchess of Norfolk, who died in 1506, only thirty years before the Dissolution. It has already been noticed in another place that there is nowhere to be found any scandal, or suggestion of scandal, concerning the Religious women of the London Houses.

The House has no history. For two hundred and fifty years the sisters carried on their quiet lives; they produced no saint; they enjoyed no ecstatic visions; they obeyed the Rule with such modifications as were introduced from time to time; their lives were monotonous, but they had their little distractions. One event alone is recorded of them—the plague of 1515—when within these walls alone twenty-seven of the sisters were carried off, besides the lay sisters and the servants.

At their dissolution their income amounted to £318: 16: 5. If we consider that the stipend of a Chantry Priest was no more than £6 or £7 a year, on which he could live, we may multiply this income by ten at least, and we may conclude that the number of sisters, making allowance for the maintenance of the House, was not more than thirty, and perhaps less, the tendency in the latter days, when there were few bequests, being to keep down the number of the sisterhood, therefore they were well off.

The Clares were not included in Cardinal Wolsey’s first suppression of the smaller Houses of 1528, nor in that of 1536. The Abbess, however, Lady Elizabeth Savage, resigned her charge in 1538, the year before the final Act was passed.

For two years the place remained empty and deserted. In 1540 however, the King granted the House to the See of Bath and Wells for a London residence. The Bishop at that time was John Clarke, a man whose share in the momentous events of the day has somehow been passed over by historians.

He was born about the year 1480; he took the degrees of B.A. and M.A. at Cambridge; he studied law at Bologna; he took Holy Orders and received many benefices, including the Mastership of the Maison Dieu at Dover. Since these preferments were scattered about in many counties, it is evident that he performed none of the duties. He was otherwise occupied. In 1519 he was sent by the King with a message to Louise of Savoy; he was made Archdeacon of Colchester, Dean of Windsor, Judge of the Court of the Star Chamber; and he was charged in 1521 with the presentation of King Henry’s work against Luther. He remained at Rome as the King’s Ambassador and the servant of Wolsey for four years; he was employed in an embassy to the Court of France, and was sent a second time to Rome. He returned with Cardinal Campeggio. By this time he had been promoted to the Bishopric of Bath and Wells.

He did not long enjoy his London residence. In the same year in which he received the gift, he was sent on an embassy to the Duke of Cleves, and, with his servants, was poisoned. He came back to die in January 1541, and was buried in the Chapel of the Clares.

The House was once more taken over by the Crown, being exchanged by Bishop Barber for other property in 1548. Edward granted it to the Duke of Suffolk in 1552. It does not appear, however, that Lady Jane Grey, his daughter, was ever resident at the House of the Clares. The Duke was executed on the 23rd of February 1554. We may believe that some of the old sanctity was still lingering about the Chapel of the vanished nuns. There is some reason to believe that the head of the Duke was brought to the Chapel and buried before the altar. In 1852 the then Earl of Dartmouth was inspecting the vaults under the modern church, where some of his ancestors are buried. He came upon something that might have been a basket full of sawdust. On examination there was found to be a head well preserved, with the marks of decapitation on the neck. The features resembled those of the beheaded Duke, and it seems probable that either by his own request, or by the pious care of a servant, the head was brought here to be laid in the Duke’s own Chapel, the former Chapel of the _Sorores Minores Inclusæ_.

After the accession of Queen Elizabeth, the Precincts of the Abbey remained, like many other Precincts, a quiet place, in whose Close houses were built. The church was granted to the people of the place on the condition of their maintaining a minister for the parish, which occupied exactly the same site as the former Abbey.

It was a small parish, no more than 255 feet in length, facing the City Wall. The old buildings were gradually pulled down, and the materials used for the new houses, but enough remained, even as late as the end of the eighteenth century, to form a picturesque collection of ruins. A fire in 1767 destroyed most of the buildings. As to the church, it became that of the Holy Trinity; it was repaired in 1618, in 1624, in 1636; it escaped the Fire of London. But most unfortunately it was taken down in 1740—with the exception of the north Wall—and rebuilt a mean and poor little church, which will remain standing as a Church House while the Parish, consisting of Haydon Green and little else, has been absorbed in that of St. Botolph, Aldgate. The new church contained something of the old chapel: the font, the reredos, the pavement before the altar, the monuments which were put up on the north wall. The church plate is also rich and curious. The charities are very small, amounting to no more than £13 a year in all.

The church was at one time—about the close of the seventeenth century—a favourite place for weddings. In 1697 there were 956; sometimes there were six, eight, or ten weddings in one day. The reason seems to have been that the church claimed to be a peculiar, and exempt from the visitation of the ordinary, therefore licenses were not required for this church any more than for St. James’s, Duke Place, or the Fleet, or May Fair.

A Roman sarcophagus, discovered within this parish, is now preserved in the British Museum.

The church is much richer in associations than would be expected from its outward appearance. There is a brass to Constance Lucy, one of the well-known Lucy family; there is the tomb of Sir John Pelham and his son; there are buried here the first Lord Dartmouth, son of Colonel William Legge, and thirty-two of his descendants; there is a portrait of Sir Isaac Newton, with the tradition that he once lived in Haydon Square and worshipped in this church; Miles Coverdale preached here, as the historian of the church, Dr. Kinns found, on eleven occasions. The tomb of Colonel William Legge, who lived in the Abbey, bears his shield, on which are impaled the arms of the Washington family, with the stars and stripes which are the origin of the American flag. The connection of the Washingtons and the Legges is given by Dr. Kinns in the following pedigree:—

Lawrence Washington = Margaret Butler. of Sulgrave, │ d. 1616. │ │ ┌───────────┴─────────────────────────┐ │ │ Sir William = Anne Villiers. Laurence = Amphilis. Washington │ Washington │ d. 1643. │ │ │ │ Elizabeth = William Legge. John = Ann Pope. │ │ The Earls of Dartmouth. Laurence = Mildred Warner. │ Augustine = Mary Bede. │ George Washington.