Chapter 6

The story of each of these spots will interweave itself with the thread of our narrative as we proceed; but I would warn my readers at the outset that I do not purpose to trace the history of Lambeth in itself, or to attempt any architectural or picturesque description of the place. What I attempt is simply to mark in incident after incident which has occurred within its walls the relation of the House to the Primates whom it has sheltered for seven hundred years, and through them to the literary, the ecclesiastical, the political history of the realm.

Nothing illustrates the last of these relations better than the site of the house itself. It is doubtful whether we can date the residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury at Lambeth, which was then a manor house of the see of Rochester, earlier than the reign of Eadward the Confessor. But there was a significance in the choice of the spot as there was a significance in the date at which the choice was made. So long as the political head of the English people ruled, like Ælfred or Æthelstan or Eadgar, from Winchester, the spiritual head of the English people was content to rule from Canterbury. It was when the piety of the Confessor and the political prescience of his successors brought the Kings finally to Westminster that the Archbishops were permanently drawn to their suffragan's manor house at Lambeth. The Norman rule gave a fresh meaning to their position. In the new course of national history which opened with the Conquest the Church was called to play a part greater than she had ever known before. Hitherto the Archbishop had been simply the head of the ecclesiastical order--a representative of the moral and spiritual forces on which government was based. The Conquest, the cessation of the great Witenagemots in which the nation, however imperfectly, had till then found a voice, turned him into a Tribune of the People.

Foreigner though he might be, it was the Primate's part to speak for the conquered race the words it could no longer utter. He was in fact the permanent leader (to borrow a modern phrase) of a Constitutional Opposition; and in addition to the older religious forces which he wielded he wielded a popular and democratic force which held the new King and the new baronage in check. It was he who received from the sovereign whom he crowned the solemn oath that he would rule not by his own will, but according to the customs, or as we should say now, the traditional constitution of the realm. It was his to call on the people to declare whether they chose him for their king, to receive the thundered "Ay, ay," of the crowd, to place the priestly unction on shoulder and breast, the royal crown on brow. To watch over the observance of the covenant of that solemn day, to raise obedience and order into religious duties, to uphold the custom and law of the realm against personal tyranny, to guard amid the darkness and brutality of the age those interests of religion, of morality, of intellectual life which as yet lay peacefully together beneath the wing of the Church,--this was the political office of the Primate in the new order which the Conquest created, and it was this office which expressed itself in the site of the house that fronted the King's house over Thames.

From the days of Archbishop Anselm therefore to the days of Stephen Langton, Lambeth only fronted Westminster as the Archbishop fronted the King. Synod met over against Council; the clerical court of the one ruler rivalled in splendour, in actual influence, the baronial court of the other. For more than a century of our history the great powers which together were to make up the England of the future lay marshalled over against each other on either side the water.

With the union of the English people and the sudden arising of English freedom which followed the Great Charter this peculiar attitude of the Archbishops passed necessarily away. When the people itself spoke again, its voice was heard not in the hall of Lambeth but in the Chapter-house which gave a home to the House of Commons in its earlier sessions at Westminster. From the day of Stephen Langton the nation has towered higher and higher above its mere ecclesiastical organization, till the one stands dwarfed beside the other as Lambeth now stands dwarfed before the mass of the Houses of Parliament. Nor was the religious change less than the political. In the Church as in the State the Archbishops suddenly fell into the rear. From the days of the first English Parliament to the days of the Reformation they not only cease to be representatives of the moral and religious forces of the nation but stand actually opposed to them. Nowhere is this better brought out than in their house beside the Thames. The political history of Lambeth lies spread over the whole of its site, from the gateway of Morton to the garden where we shall see Cranmer musing on the fate of Anne Boleyn. Its ecclesiastical interest on the other hand is concentrated in a single spot. We must ask our readers therefore to follow us beneath the groining of the Gate-House into the quiet little court that lies on the river-side of the hall. Passing over its trim grass-plot to a doorway at the angle of Lollards' Tower, and mounting a few steps, they will find themselves in a square antechamber, paved roughly with tiles, and with a single small window looking out towards the Thames. The chamber is at the base of Lollards' Tower; in the centre stands a huge oaken pillar, to which the room owes its name of the "Post-room," and to which somewhat mythical tradition asserts Lollards to have been tied when they were "examined" by the whip. On its western side a doorway of the purest Early English work leads us directly into the palace Chapel.

It is strange to stand at a single step in the very heart of the ecclesiastical life of so many ages, within walls beneath which the men in whose hands the fortunes of English religion have been placed from the age of the Great Charter till to-day have come and gone; to see the light falling through the tall windows with their marble shafts on the spot where Wyclif fronted Sudbury, on the lowly tomb of Parker, on the stately screen-work of Laud, on the altar where the last sad communion of Sancroft originated the Nonjurors. It is strange to note the very characteristics of the building itself, marred as it is by modern restoration, and to feel how simply its stern, unadorned beauty, the beauty of Salisbury and of Lincoln, expressed the very tone of the Church that finds its centre there.

And hardly less strange is it to recall the odd, roystering figure of the Primate to whom, if tradition be true, it owes this beauty. Boniface of Savoy was the youngest of three brothers out of whom their niece Eleanor, the queen of Henry the Third, was striving to build up a foreign party in the realm. Her uncle Amadeus was richly enfeoffed with English lands; the Savoy Palace in the Strand still recalls the settlement and the magnificence of her uncle Peter. For this third and younger uncle she grasped at the highest post in the State save the Crown itself. "The handsome Archbishop," as his knights loved to call him, was not merely a foreigner as Lanfranc and Anselm had been foreigners--strange in manner or in speech to the flock whom they ruled--he was foreign in the worst sense: strange to their freedom, their sense of law, their reverence for piety. His first visit set everything on fire. He retreated to Lyons to hold a commission in the Pope's body-guard, but even Innocent was soon weary of his tyranny. When the threat of sequestration recalled him after four years of absence to his see, his hatred of England, his purpose soon to withdraw again to his own sunny South, were seen in his refusal to furnish Lambeth. Certainly he went the wrong way to stay here. The young Primate brought with him Savoyard fashions, strange enough to English folk. His armed retainers, foreigners to a man, plundered the City markets. His own archiepiscopal fist felled to the ground a prior who opposed his visitation. It was the Prior of St. Bartholomew's by Smithfield; and London, on the King's refusal to grant redress, took the matter into her own hands. The City bells swung out, and a noisy crowd of citizens were soon swarming beneath the walls of the palace, shouting threats of vengeance.

For shouts Boniface cared little. In the midst of the tumult he caused the sentences of excommunication which he had fulminated to be legally executed in the chapel of his house. But bravado like this soon died before the universal resentment, and "the handsome Archbishop" fled again to Lyons. How helpless the successor of Augustine really was was shown by a daring outrage perpetrated in his absence. Master Eustace, his official, had thrown into prison the Prior of St. Thomas's Hospital for some contempt of court; and the Prior's diocesan, the Bishop of Winchester, a prelate as foreign and lawless as Boniface himself, took up the injury as his own. A party of his knights appeared before the house at Lambeth, tore the gates from their hinges, set Master Eustace on horseback, and carried him off to the episcopal prison at Farnham. At last Boniface bowed to submission, surrendered the points at issue, recalled his excommunications, and was suffered to return. He had learnt his lesson well enough to remain from that time a quiet, inactive man, with a dash of continental frugality and wit about him. Whether he built the chapel or no, he would probably have said of it as he said of the Great Hall at Canterbury, "My predecessors built, and I discharge the debt for their building. It seems to me that the true builder is the man that pays the bill."

But Boniface never learnt to be an Englishman. When under the guidance of Earl Simon of Montfort the barons wrested the observance of their Charter from the King the Primate of England found shelter in a fresh exile. The Church had in fact ceased to be national. The figure of the first Reformer, as he stands on the chapel floor, is in itself the fittest comment on the age in which the chapel was built, an age when the interests of popular liberty and of intellectual freedom had sheered off from the church which had so long been their protector. With them the moral and spiritual life of the people sheered off too. The vast ecclesiastical fabric rested in the days of Archbishop Sudbury solely on its wealth and its tradition. Suddenly a single man summed up in himself the national, the mental, the moral power it had lost, and struck at the double base on which it rested. Wyclif, the keenest intellect of his day, national and English to the very core, declared its tradition corrupt and its wealth antichrist. The two forces that above all had built up the system of mediæval Christianity, the subtlety of the schoolman, the enthusiasm of the penniless preacher, united to strike it down.

It is curious to mark how timidly the Primate of the day dealt with such a danger as this. Sudbury was acting in virtue of a Papal injunction, but he acted as though the shadow of the terrible doom that was awaiting him had already fallen over him. He summoned the popular Bishop of London to his aid ere he cited the Reformer to his judgment-seat. It was not as a prisoner that Wyclif appeared in the chapel: from the first his tone was that of a man who knew that he was secure. He claimed to have the most favourable construction put upon his words; then, availing himself of his peculiar subtlety of interpretation, he demanded that where they might bear two meanings his judges should take them in an orthodox sense. It was not a noble scene--there was little in it of Luther's "Here stand I--I can none other;" but both sides were in fact acting a part. On the one hand the dead pressure of ecclesiastical fanaticism was driving the Primate into a position from which he sought only to escape; on the other Wyclif was merely gaining time--"beating step," as men say--with his scholastic formulæ. What he looked for soon came. There was a rumour in the City that Papal delegates were sitting in judgment on the Reformer, and London was at once astir. Crowds of angry citizens flocked round the archiepiscopal house, and already there was talk of attacking it when a message from the Council of Regency commanded a suspension of all proceedings in the case. Sudbury dismissed his prisoner with a formal injunction, and the day was for ever lost to the Church.

But if in Sudbury the Church had retreated peaceably before Wyclif, it was not from any doubt of the deadly earnestness of the struggle that lay before her. Archbishop Chichele's accession to the primacy was the signal for the building of Lollards' Tower. Dr. Maitland has shown that the common name rests on a mere error, and that the Lollards' Tower which meets us so grimly in the pages of Foxe was really a western tower of St. Paul's. But, as in so many other instances, the popular voice showed a singular historical tact in its mistake; the tower which Chichele raised marked more than any other in the very date of its erection the new age of persecution on which England was to enter. From a gateway in the northern side of the Post-room worn stone steps lead up to a dungeon in which many a prisoner for the faith must have lain. The massive oaken door, the iron rings bolted into the wall, the one narrow window looking out over the river, tell their tale as well as the broken sentences scratched or carved around. Some are mere names; here and there some light-pated youngster paying for his night's uproar has carved his dice or his "Jesus kep me out of all il compane, Amen." But "Jesus est amor meus" is sacred, whether Lollard or Jesuit graved it in the lonely prison hours, and not less sacred the "Deo sit gratiarum actio" that marks perhaps the leap of a martyr's heart at the news of the near advent of his fiery deliverance. It is strange to think, as one winds once more down the stairs that such feet have trodden, how soon England answered to the challenge that Lollards' Tower flung out over the Thames. The white masonry had hardly grown grey under the buffetings of a hundred years ere Lollard was no longer a word of shame, and the reformation that Wyclif had begun sat enthroned within the walls of the chapel where he had battled for his life.

The attitude of the primates indeed showed that sooner or later such a reformation was inevitable. From the moment when Wyclif stood in Lambeth Chapel the Church sank ecclesiastically as well as politically into non-existence. It survived merely as a vast landowner, whilst its primates, after a short effort to resume their older position as real heads of their order, dwindled into ministers and tools of the Crown. The Gate-tower of the house, the grand mass of brickwork, whose dark red tones are (or, alas! were till a year or two since) so exquisitely brought out by the grey stone of its angles and the mullions of its broad arch-window, recalls an age--that of its builder, Archbishop Morton--when Lambeth, though the residence of the first minister of the crown, had really lost all hold on the nobler elements of political life. It was raised from this degradation by the efforts of a primate to whose merits justice has hardly as yet been done. First in date among the genuine portraits of the Archbishops of Canterbury which hang round the walls of the Guard-room at Lambeth is the portrait of Archbishop Warham. The plain, homely old man's face still looks down on us line for line as the "seeing eye" of Holbein gazed on it three centuries ago. "I instance this picture," says Mr. Wornum, in his life of the painter, "as an illustration that Holbein had the power of seeing what he looked on, and of perfectly transferring to his picture what he saw." Memorable in the annals of art as the first of that historic series which brings home to us as no age has ever been brought home to eyes of aftertime the age of the English Reformation, it is even more memorable as marking the close of the great intellectual movement which the Reformation swept away.

It was with a letter from Erasmus in his hands that Hans Holbein stood before the aged Archbishop, still young as when he sketched himself at Basel with the fair, frank, manly face, the sweet gentle mouth, the heavy red cap flinging its shade over the mobile, melancholy brow. But it was more than the "seventy years" that he has so carefully noted above it that the artist saw in the Primate's face; it was the still, impassive calm of a life's disappointment. Only ten years before, at the very moment when the painter first made his entry into Basel, Erasmus had been forwarding to England the great work in which he had recalled theologians to the path of sound biblical criticism. "Every lover of letters," the great scholar wrote sadly, after the old man had gone to his rest,--"Every lover of letters owes to Warham that he is the possessor of my 'Jerome';" and with an acknowledgment of the Primate's bounty such as he alone in Christendom could give the edition bore in its forefront his memorable dedication to the Archbishop. That Erasmus could find protection for such a work in Warham's name, that he could address him with a conviction of his approval in words so bold and outspoken as those of his preface, tell us how completely the old man sympathized with the highest tendencies of the New Learning.

Of the Renascence, that "new birth" of the world--for I cling to a word so eminently expressive of a truth that historians of our day seem inclined to forget or to deny--of that regeneration of mankind through the sudden upgrowth of intellectual liberty, Lambeth was in England the shrine. With the Reformation which followed it Lambeth, as we shall see, had little to do. But the home of Warham was the home of the revival of letters. With a singular fitness, the venerable library which still preserves their tradition, ousted from its older dwelling-place by the demolition of the cloister, has in modern days found refuge in the Great Hall, the successor and copy of that hall where the men of the New Learning, where Colet and More and Grocyn and Linacre gathered round the table of Warham.

It was with Grocyn that Erasmus rowed up the river to the Primate's board. Warham addressed a few kindly words to the poor scholar before and after dinner, and then drawing him aside into a corner of the hall (his usual way when he made a present to any one) slipped into his hand an acknowledgment for the book and dedication he had brought with him. "How much did the Archbishop give you?" asked his companion as they rowed home again. "An immense amount!" replied Erasmus, but his friend saw the discontent on his face, and drew from him how small the sum really was. Then the disappointed scholar burst into a string of indignant questions: was Warham miserly, or was he poor, or did he really think such a present expressed the value of the book? Grocyn frankly blurted out the true reason for Warham's economy in his shrewd suspicion that this was not the first dedication that had been prefixed to the 'Hecuba,' and it is likely enough that the Primate's suspicion was right. At any rate, Erasmus owns that Grocyn's sardonic comment, "It is the way with you scholars," stuck in his mind even when he returned to Paris, and made him forward to the Archbishop a perfectly new translation of the 'Iphigenia.'

Few men seem to have realized more thoroughly than Warham the new conception of an intellectual and moral equality before which the old social distinctions were to vanish away. In his intercourse with this group of friends he seems utterly unconscious of the exalted station which he occupied in the eyes of men. Take such a story as Erasmus tells of a visit of Dean Colet to Lambeth. The Dean took Erasmus in the boat with him, and read as they rowed along a section called 'The Remedy for Anger' in his friend's popular 'Handbook of the Christian Soldier.' When they reached the hall however Colet plumped gloomily down by Warham's side, neither eating nor drinking nor speaking in spite of the Archbishop's good-humoured attempt to draw him into conversation. It was only by starting the new topic of a comparison of ages that the Archbishop was at last successful; and when dinner was over Colet's ill-temper had utterly fled. Erasmus saw him draw aside an old man who had shared their board, and engage in the friendliest greeting. "What a fortunate fellow you are!" began the impetuous Dean, as the two friends stepped again into their boat; "what a tide of good-luck you bring with you!" Erasmus, of course, protested (one can almost see the half-earnest, half-humorous smile on his lip) that he was the most unfortunate fellow on earth. He was at any rate a bringer of good fortune to his friends, the Dean retorted; one friend at least he had saved from an unseemly outbreak of passion. At the Archbishop's table, in fact, Colet had found himself placed opposite to an uncle with whom he had long waged a bitter family feud, and it was only the singular chance which had brought him thither fresh from the wholesome lessons of the 'Handbook' that had enabled the Dean to refrain at the moment from open quarrel, and at last to get such a full mastery over his temper as to bring about a reconciliation with his kinsman. Colet was certainly very lucky in his friend's lessons, but he was perhaps quite as fortunate in finding a host so patient and good-tempered as Archbishop Warham.

Primate and scholar were finally separated at last by the settlement of Erasmus at Basel, but the severance brought no interruption to their friendship. "England is my last anchor," Erasmus wrote bitterly to a rich German prelate; "if that goes, I must beg." The anchor held as long as Warham lived. Years go by, but the Primate is never tired of new gifts and remembrances to the brave, sensitive scholar at whose heels all the ignorance and bigotry of Europe was yelping. Sometimes indeed he was luckless in his presents; once he sent a horse to his friend, and, in spite of the well-known proverb about looking such a gift in the mouth, got a witty little snub for his pains. "He is no doubt a good steed at bottom," Erasmus gravely confesses, "but it must be owned he is not over-handsome; however he is at any rate free from all mortal sins, with the trifling exception of gluttony and laziness! If he were only a father confessor now! he has all the qualities to fit him for one--indeed, he is only _too_ prudent, modest, humble, chaste, and peaceable!" Still, admirable as these characteristics are, he is not quite the nag one expected. "I fancy that through some knavery or blundering on your servant's part, I must have got a different steed from the one you intended for me. In fact, now I come to remember, I had bidden my servant not to accept a horse except it were a good one; but I am infinitely obliged to you all the same." Even Warham's temper must have been tried as he laughed over such a letter as this; but the precious work of art which Lambeth contains proves that years only intensified their friendship. It was, as we have seen, with a letter of Erasmus in his hands, that on his first visit to England Holbein presented himself before Warham; and Erasmus responded to his friend's present of a copy of this portrait by forwarding a copy of his own.