Chapter 8

Not even the Archbishop's study with its array of Missals and Breviaries and Books of Hours, not even the gallery with its "superstitious pictures," the three Italian masterpieces that he hurried as evidence to the bar of the House of Lords, so revealed to this terrible detective "the rotten, idolatrous heart" of the Primate as the sight of the chapel. It was soon reduced to simplicity. We have seen how sharply even in prison Laud felt the havoc made by the soldiery. But worse profanation was to follow. In 1648 the house passed by sale to the regicide Colonel Scott; the Great Hall was at once demolished, and the chapel turned into the dining-room of the household. The tomb of Parker was levelled with the ground; and if we are to believe the story of the royalists, the new owner felt so keenly the discomfort of dining over a dead man's bones that the remains of the great Protestant primate were disinterred and buried anew in an adjoining field.

The story of the library is a more certain one. From the days of Bancroft to those of Laud it had remained secure in the rooms over the great cloister where Parker's collection had probably stood before it passed to Cambridge. There in Parker's day Foxe had busied himself in work for the later editions of his 'Acts and Monuments;' even in the present library one book at least bears his autograph and the marginal marks of his use. There the great scholars of the seventeenth century, with Selden among them, had carried on their labours. The time was now come when Selden was to save the library from destruction. At the sale of Lambeth the Parliament ordered the books and manuscripts to be sold with the house. Selden dexterously interposed. The will of its founder, Bancroft, he pleaded, directed that in case room should not be found for it at Lambeth his gift should go to Cambridge; and the Parliament, convinced by its greatest scholar, suffered the books to be sent to the University.

When the Restoration brought the Stuart home again, it flung Scott into the Tower and set Juxon in the ruined, desecrated walls. Of the deeper thoughts that such a scene might have suggested few probably found their way into the simple, limited mind of the new primate. The whole pathos of Juxon's position lay in fact in his perfect absorption in the past. The books were reclaimed from their Cambridge Adullam. The chapel was rescued from desecration, and the fine woodwork of screen and stalls replaced as Laud had left them. The demolition of the hall left him a more serious labour, and the way in which he entered on it brought strikingly out Juxon's temper. He knew that he had but a few years to live, and he set himself but one work to do before he died, the replacing everything in the state in which the storm of the rebellion had found it. He resolved therefore not only to rebuild the hall but to rebuild it precisely as it had stood before it was destroyed. It was in vain that he was besieged by the remonstrances of "classical" architects, that he was sneered at even by Pepys as "old-fashioned"; times had changed and fashions had changed, but Juxon would recognize no change at all. He died ere the building was finished, but even in death his inflexible will provided that his plans should be adhered to. The result has been a singularly happy one. It was not merely that the Archbishop has left us one of the noblest examples of that strange yet successful revival of Gothic feeling of which the staircase of Christ Church Hall, erected at much about the same time, furnishes so exquisite a specimen. It is that in his tenacity to the past he has preserved the historic interest of his hall. Beneath the picturesque woodwork of the roof, in the quiet light that breaks through the quaint mullions of its windows, the student may still recall without a jar the figures which make Lambeth memorable, figures such as those of Warham and Erasmus, of Grocyn and Colet and More. Unhappily there was a darker side to this conservatism. The Archbishops had returned like the Bourbons, forgetting nothing and having learned hardly anything. If any man could have learned the lesson of history it was Juxon's successor, the hard sceptical Sheldon, and one of the jottings in Pepys' Diary shows us what sort of lesson he had learned. Pepys had gone down the river at noon to dine with the Archbishop in company with Sir Christopher Wren, "the first time," as he notes, "that I ever was there, and I have long longed for it." Only a few days before he had had a terrible disappointment, for "Mr. Wren and I took boat, thinking to dine with my Lord of Canterbury, but when we came to Lambeth the gate was shut, which is strictly done at twelve o'clock, and nobody comes in afterwards, so we lost our labour." On this occasion Pepys was more fortunate. He found "a noble house and well furnished with good pictures and furniture, and noble attendance in good order, and a great deal of company, though an ordinary day, and exceeding good cheer, nowhere better or so much that ever I think I saw." Sheldon with his usual courtesy gave his visitors kindly welcome, and Pepys was preparing to withdraw at the close of dinner when he heard news which induced him to remain. The almost incredible scene that followed must be told in his own words:--"Most of the company gone, and I going, I heard by a gentleman of a sermon that was to be there; and so I stayed to hear it, thinking it to be serious, till by-and-by the gentleman told me it was a mockery by one Cornet Bolton, a very gentlemanlike man, that behind a chair did pray and preach like a Presbyter Scot, with all the possible imitation in grimaces and voice. And his text about the hanging up their harps upon the willows; and a serious, good sermon too, exclaiming against bishops and crying up of my good Lord Eglington till it made us all burst. But I did wonder to hear the Bishop at this time to make himself sport with things of this kind; but I perceive it was shown to him as a rarity, and he took care to have the room door shut; but there were about twenty gentlemen there, infinitely pleased with the 'novelty.'"

It was "novelties" like these that led the last of the Stuarts to his fatal belief that he could safely defy a Church that had so severed itself from the English religion in doing the work of the Crown. The pen of a great historian has told for all time the Trial of the Seven Bishops, and though their protest was drawn up at Lambeth I may not venture to tell it here. Of all the seven in fact Sancroft was probably the least inclined to resistance, the one prelate to whom the cheers of the great multitude at their acquittal brought least sense of triumph.

No sooner indeed was James driven from the throne than the Primate fell back into the servile king-worship of an England that was passing away. Within the closed gates of Lambeth he debated endlessly with himself and with his fellow-bishops the questions of "de jure" and "de facto" right to the crown. Every day he sheered further and further from the actual world around him. Newton, who was with him at Lambeth when it was announced that the Convention had declared the throne vacant, found that Sancroft's thoughts were not with England or English freedom--they were concentrated on the question whether James's child were a supposititious one or no. "He wished," he said, "they had gone on a more regular method and examined into the birth of the young child. There was reason," he added, "to believe he was not the same as the first, which might easily be known, for he had a mole on his neck." The new Government bore long with the old man, and Bancroft for a time seems really to have wavered. He suffered his chaplains to take the oaths and then scolded them bitterly for praying for William and Mary. He declined to take his seat at the Council board, and yet issued his commission for the consecration of Burnet. At last his mind was made up and the Government on his final refusal to take the oath of allegiance had no alternative but to declare the see vacant.

For six months Bancroft was still suffered to remain in his house, though Tillotson was nominated as his successor. With a perfect courtesy, worthy of the saintly temper which was his characteristic, Tillotson waited long at the deprived Archbishop's door desiring a conference. But Sancroft refused to see him. Evelyn found the old man in a dismantled house, bitter at his fall. "Say 'nolo,' and say it from the heart," he had replied passionately to Beveridge when he sought his counsel on the offer of a bishopric. Others asked whether after refusing the oaths they might attend worship where the new sovereigns were prayed for. "If they do," answered Sancroft, "they will need the Absolution at the end as well as at the beginning of the service." In the answer lay the schism of the Nonjurors, and to this schism Sancroft soon gave definite form. On Whitsunday the new Church was started in the archiepiscopal Chapel. The throng of visitors was kept standing at the palace gate. No one was admitted to the Chapel but some fifty who had refused the oaths. The Archbishop himself consecrated: one Nonjuror reading the prayers, another preaching. A formal action of ejectment was the answer to this open defiance, and on the evening of its decision in favour of the Crown Sancroft withdrew quietly by boat over Thames to the Temple. He was soon followed by many who, amidst the pettiness of his public views, could still realize the grandeur of his self-devotion. To one, the Earl of Aylesbury, the Archbishop himself opened the door. His visitor, struck with the change of all he saw from the pomp of Lambeth, burst into tears and owned how deeply the sight affected him. "O my good lord," replied Sancroft, "rather rejoice with me, for now I live again."

With Sancroft's departure opens a new age of Lambeth's ecclesiastical history. The Revolution which flung him aside had completed the work of the great Rebellion in sweeping away for ever the old pretensions of the primates to an autocracy within the Church of England. But it seemed to have opened a nobler prospect in placing them at the head of the Protestant Churches of the world. In their common peril before the great Catholic aggression, which found equal support at Paris and Vienna, the Reformed communities of the Continent looked for aid and sympathy to the one Reformed Church whose position was now unassailable. The congregations of the Palatinate appealed to Lambeth when they were trodden under foot beneath the horse-hoofs of Turenne. The same appeal came from the Vaudois refugees in Germany, the Silesian Protestants, the Huguenot churches that still fought for existence in France, the Calvinists of Geneva, the French refugees who had forsaken their sunny homes in the south for the Gospel and God. In the dry letter-books on the Lambeth shelves, in the records of bounty dispensed through the Archbishop to the persecuted and the stranger, in the warm and cordial correspondence with Lutheran and Calvinist, survives a faint memory of the golden visions which filled Protestant hearts after the accession of the great Deliverer. "The eyes of the world are upon us," was Tenison's plea for union with Protestants at home. "All the Reformed Churches are in expectation of something to be done which may make for union and peace." When a temper so cold as Tenison's could kindle in this fashion it is no wonder that more enthusiastic minds launched into loftier expectations--that Leibnitz hoped to see the union of Calvinist and Lutheran accomplished by a common adoption of the English Liturgy, that a High Churchman like Nicholls revived the plan, which Cranmer had proposed and Calvin had supported, of a general council of Protestants to be held in England. One by one such visions faded before the virulence of party spirit, the narrowness and timidity of Churchmen, the base and selfish politics of the time. Few men had higher or more spiritual conceptions of Christian unity than Tenison; yet the German translation of our Liturgy, stamped with the royal monogram of King Frederick, which still exists in the library, reminds us how in mere jealousy of a Tory triumph Tenison flung away the offer of a union with the Church of Prussia. The creeping ambition of Dubois foiled whatever dreams Archbishop Wake may have entertained of a union with the Church of France.

From the larger field of political and ecclesiastical history we may turn again ere we close to the narrower limits of the Lambeth Library. The storm which drove Sancroft from his house left his librarian, Henry Wharton, still bound to the books he loved so well. Wharton is one of those instances of precocious developement which are rarer in the sober walks of historical investigation than in art. It is a strange young face that we see in the frontispiece to his sermons, the impression of its broad, high brow and prominent nose so oddly in contrast with the delicate, feminine curves of the mouth, and yet repeated in the hard, concentrated gaze of the large, full eyes which look out from under the enormous wig. Wharton was the most accomplished of Cambridge students when he quitted the University at twenty-two to aid Cave in his 'Historia Litteraria.' But the time proved too exciting for a purely literary career. At Tenison's instigation the young scholar plunged into the thick of the controversy which had been provoked by the aggression of King James, and his vigour soon attracted the notice of Sancroft. He became one of the Archbishop's chaplains, and was presented in a single year to two of the best livings in his gift. With these however save in his very natural zeal for pluralities he seems to have concerned himself little. It was with the library which now passed into his charge that his name was destined to be associated. Under him its treasures were thrown liberally open to the ecclesiastical antiquaries of his day--to Hody, to Stillingfleet, to Collier, to Atterbury, and to Strype, who was just beginning his voluminous collections towards the illustration of the history of the sixteenth century. But no one made so much use of the documents in his charge as Wharton himself. In them, no doubt, lay the secret of his consent to take the oath, to separate from his earlier patron, to accept the patronage of Tenison. But there was no permanent breach with Sancroft; on his deathbed the Archbishop committed to him the charge of editing Laud's papers, a charge redeemed by his publication of the 'Troubles and Trials' of the Archbishop in 1694.

But this with other labours were mere by-play. The design upon which his energies were mainly concentrated was "to exhibit a complete ecclesiastical history of England to the Reformation," and the two volumes of the 'Anglia Sacra,' which appeared during his life, were intended as a partial fulfilment of this design. Of these, as they now stand, the second is by far the more valuable. The four archiepiscopal biographies by Osbern, the three by Eadmer, Malmesbury's lives of Aldhelm and Wulstan, the larger collection of works by Giraldus Cambrensis, Chaundler's biographies of Wykeham and Bekington, and the collection of smaller documents which accompanied these, formed a more valuable contribution to our ecclesiastical history than had up to Wharton's time ever been made. The first volume contained the chief monastic annals which illustrated the history of the sees whose cathedrals were possessed by monks; those served by canons regular or secular were reserved for a third volume, while a fourth was to have contained the episcopal annals of the Church from the Reformation to the Revolution.

The last however was never destined to appear, and its predecessor was interrupted after the completion of the histories of London and St. Asaph by the premature death of the great scholar. In 1694 Battely writes a touching account to Strype of his interview with Wharton at Canterbury:--"One day he opened his trunk and drawers, and showed me his great collections concerning the state of our Church, and with a great sigh told me his labours were at an end, and that his strength would not permit him to finish any more of that subject." Vigorous and healthy as his natural constitution was he had worn it out with the severity of his toil. He denied himself refreshment in his eagerness for study, and sat over his books in the bitterest days of winter till hands and feet were powerless with the cold. At last nature abruptly gave way, his last hopes of recovery were foiled by an immoderate return to his old pursuits, and at the age of thirty-one Henry Wharton died a quiet scholar's death. Archbishop Tenison stood with Bishop Lloyd by the grave in Westminster, where the body was laid "with solemn and devout anthems composed by that most ingenious artist, Mr. Harry Purcell;" and over it were graven words that tell the broken story of so many a student life:--"Multa ad augendam et illustrandam rem literariam conscripsit; plura moliebatur."

The library no longer rests in those quiet rooms over the great cloister in which a succession of librarians, such as Gibson and Wilkins and Ducarel, preserved the tradition of Henry Wharton. The 'Codex' of the first, the 'Concilia' of the second, and the elaborate analysis of the Canterbury Registers which we owe to the third are, like Wharton's own works, of primary importance to the study of English ecclesiastical history. It was reserved for our own day to see these memories swept away by the degradation of the cloister into a kitchen yard and a scullery; but the Great Hall of Archbishop Juxon, to which by a happy fortune the books were transferred, has seen in Dr. Maitland and Professor Stubbs keepers whose learning more than rivals the learning of Wharton himself. It is not without significance that this great library still lies open to the public as a part and a notable part of the palace of the chief prelate of the English Church. Even if Philistines abound in it the spirit and drift of the English Church have never been wholly Philistine. It has managed somehow to reflect and represent the varying phases of English life and English thought; it has developed more and more a certain original largeness and good-tempered breadth of view; amidst the hundred jarring theories of itself and its position which it has embraced at one time or another it has never stooped to the mere "pay over the counter" theory of Little Bethel. Above all it has as yet managed to find room for almost every shade of religious opinion; and it has answered at once to every national revival of taste, of beauty, and of art.

Great as are the faults of the Church of England, these are merits which make men who care more for the diffusion of culture than for the propagation of this shade or that shade of religious opinion shrink from any immediate wish for her fall. And they are merits which spring from this, that she is still a learned Church, not learned in the sense of purely theological or ecclesiastical learning, but a Church which is able to show among its clergy men of renown in every branch of literature, critical, poetical, historical, or scientific. How long this distinction is to continue her own it is hard to say; there are signs indeed in the theological temper which is creeping over the clergy that it is soon to cease. But the spirit of intelligence, of largeness of view, of judicious moderation, which is so alien from the theological spirit, can still look for support from the memories of Lambeth. Whatever its influence may have been, it has not grown out of the noisy activity of theological "movement." Its strength has been to sit still and let such "movements" pass by. It is by a spirit the very opposite of theirs--a spirit of conciliation, of largeness of heart, that it has won its power over the Church. None of the great theological impulses of this age or the last, it is sometimes urged, came out of Lambeth. Little of the theological bitterness, of the controversial narrowness of this age or the last, it may fairly be answered, has ever entered its gates. Of Lambeth we may say what Matthew Arnold says of Oxford, that many as are its faults it has never surrendered itself to ecclesiastical Philistines. In the calm, genial silence of its courts, its library, its galleries, in the presence of its venerable past, the virulence, the petty strife, the tumult of religious fanaticism finds itself hushed. Amongst the storm of the Wesleyan revival, of the Evangelical revival, of the Puseyite revival, the voice of Lambeth has ever pleaded for a truth simpler, larger, more human than theirs. Amid the deafening clamour of Tractarian and anti-Tractarian disputants both sides united in condemning the silence of Lambeth. Yet the one word that came from Lambeth will still speak to men's hearts when all their noisy disputations are forgotten. "How," a prelate, whose nearest relative had joined the Church of Rome, asked Archbishop Howley, "how shall I treat my brother?" "As a brother," was the Archbishop's reply.

CHILDREN BY THE SEA.

Autumn brings its congresses--scientific, ecclesiastical, archæological--but the prettiest of autumnal congresses is the children's congress by the sea. It is like a leap from prose into poetry when we step away from Associations and Institutes, from stuffy lecture-rooms and dismal sections, to the strip of sand which the children have chosen for their annual gathering. Behind us are the great white cliffs, before us the reach of grey waters with steamers and their smoke-trail in the offing and waves washing lazily in upon the shore. And between sea and cliff are a world of little creatures, digging, dabbling, delighted. What strikes us at first sight is the number of them. In ordinary life we meet the great host of children in detail, as it were; we kiss our little ones in the morning, we tumble over a perambulator, we dodge a hoop, we pat back a ball. Child after child meets us, but we never realize the world of children till we see it massed upon the sands. Children of every age, from the baby to the schoolboy; big children and tiny children, weak little urchins with pale cheeks and plump little urchins with sturdy legs; children of all tempers, from the screeching child in arms to the quiet child sitting placid and gazing out of large grey eyes; gay little madcaps paddling at the water's edge; busy children, idle children, children careful of their dress, hoydens covered with sand and seaweed, wild children, demure children--all are mustered in the great many-coloured camp between the cliffs and the sea.