CHAPTER VI

ROUND ABOUT HOLBORN

“Yet London lacks not poetry, She has her voices, whose deep tones Are human laughter and human moans, And all her beauty, all her glory, Spring from or blend with man’s strange story.” MAXWELL GRAY.

Take that chilly-sounding gateway, the Marble Arch, as a _point de départ_ for a walk some idle afternoon, and I will show you what I found the day I turned my back on it. It looks as bored by its inactivity as Théophile Gautier’s Obélisque; perhaps it regrets the days when it faced Buckingham Palace and feels it came down in the world when it was moved to its present position some seventy years ago.

And that, too, is another indignity. Very many people ask why the Marble Arch is stranded all by itself, like a rock from which the flood has receded. The reason is as simple as most utilitarian things. The press of traffic at the Marble Arch was so great that the space had to be widened. It would have been too costly a matter to move the Marble Arch back, so the park railings were moved and the Arch left high and dry, no longer a gateway but only an object of interest.

I grant you that at first sight the Oxford Street and Holborn of to-day have a blatantly modern look. There is little to remind one in the kaleidoscopic vista of badly-dressed shop windows, gaudy buildings and dingy offices, that Roman soldiers once tramped along this very road. It took about a thousand years from the time that Agricola recalled his Roman legions from England for the discomfort of the Holborn mudholes to become unendurable, and for Henry V. to follow in 1417 the earlier example of his French _confrère_ Philippe Auguste and cause the king’s highway to be paved at his expense. The paving does not seem to have been kept in good repair, for the garrulous Pepys says, 250 years later, that the king’s coach was overturned in Holborn.

Travellers along Holborn, at the other end of the social scale, shared in the royal benefit, for from 1196 to 1783 condemned criminals were brought in carts from Newgate Prison to Tyburn Tree. Everyone has heard of the famous gallows, but few people know that the exact spot where it stood is marked to-day by a triangular stone set in the roadway, almost opposite the beginning of the Edgware Road. A bronze plate on the railings of the Park, on the other side of the road, commemorates the fact, but if both stone and plate elude you, the friendly policeman who is always on duty here will point them out.

From the Marble Arch to Holborn there is nothing to look at but interminable shops till you come to the quaint old houses of Staple Inn, as disdainfully out of keeping with their vulgar surroundings as an orchid would be in an onion bed.

STAPLE INN

“I went astray in Holborn through an arched entrance, over which was Staple Inn.”--HAWTHORNE.

Staple Inn is one of the most delicious things in London. Out of the roar and hurry of Holborn you pass through the old Jacobean gateway with the façade of oaken beams into the tranquil old-world court where the noise suddenly dies away, and you can sit peacefully under the shade of the plane-trees, as far removed from the bustle and racket without the gate as if you had been suddenly transported a hundred miles on a magician’s carpet. From a kindly porter may be bought, for one shilling and sixpence, a delightful little history of this “fayrest Inne of Chancerie,” where Johnson lived after finishing his _Rasselas_ in a week to pay for the expenses of his mother’s funeral.

When you are tired of sitting quietly in this “veriest home of peace,” go across the courtyard to the hall of the Inn and look at the carved oaken roof and the grotesque ornaments, at the Grinling Gibbons clock-case and the old stained glass windows, and before you leave Staple Inn go through the second court and look at the old sunk garden that is so unconcernedly green in the very heart of this big city. At the back of the Patent Offices that make the southern boundary of Staple Inn is Took’s Court--the Cook’s Court where Mr. Snagsby of _Bleak House_ lived--once a place of those curious semi-prisons called sponging-houses that were like debtors’ boarding-houses with the bailiff for the landlord.

Took’s Court is a sordid enough place now, and some of it may soon disappear, but it has a vicarious interest because Sheridan spent some of the last years of his life in a sponging-house here.

GRAY’S INN

“Whene’er through Gray’s Inn porch I stray I meet a spirit by the way; I roam beneath the ancient trees, And talk with him of mysteries; He tells me truly what I am-- I walk with mighty Verulam.”

Gray’s Inn, another of the gracious, leisurely London corners that few of London’s visitors discover, lies to the north of Holborn in the Gray’s Inn Road. Any of the buses along Holborn will take you there, and it is only a few minutes’ walk behind Chancery Lane Station on the Central London Railway. You could once wander in the old gardens more freely than in the other Inns, and if you slipped his _Essays_ in your pocket could read what Sir Francis Bacon wrote about gardens in the very garden that he made. Bacon was once Treasurer of Gray’s Inn and he interested himself in the laying out of “the purest of human pleasures” that he found there. Gray’s Inn Gardens used to be as fashionable a place for a walk as Hyde Park is to-day. Pepys the Chatterer related the doings of numberless people when he wrote: “When church was done my wife and I walked to Gray’s Inn to observe fashions of the ladies, because of my wife’s making some clothes.” Pepys must have gone there very often, for two months later the frivolous Secretary wrote: “I was very well pleased with the sight of a fine lady that I have often seen walk in Gray’s Inn Walks.”

Times have changed and fine ladies are no longer allowed to walk in Gray’s Inn Gardens, unless indeed they have relations among the benchers who are complaisant in the matter of keys.

The Hall is the oldest and most beautiful thing in Gray’s Inn. Queen Elizabeth once came to a banquet here, and it was here that the _Comedy of Errors_ was first performed. The old Inn has had many famous names among its members, the Sydneys, Cecils, Bacons, etc., and a man no less distinguished in another circle, Jacob Tonson, had his first bookshop just inside Gray’s Inn Gate.

The old bookseller and publisher’s name has a very modern interest, even for the London visitor who never turns the pages of Pope or Walpole, because his house at Barn Elms is now used as the Ranelagh Club. The people who go out to Ranelagh of a fine afternoon to drink tea and watch the polo, are following the footsteps of the members of the famous Kit-Cat Club founded in 1700, it is popularly supposed as an outcome of the dinners Tonson offered to his patrons. The club, of which Tonson became secretary, consisted of thirty-nine members--authors, wits and noblemen--their portraits hang in the halls of the Ranelagh Club to-day.

Tonson published for Addison and Pope, and was the first man to print cheap editions of Shakespeare. He had innumerable friends, and his portrait shows him as a genial creature who must have merited the description of him, written in 1714, that I found in _Old and New London_:

“While in your early days of reputation, You for blue garters had not such a passion; While yet you did not live, as now your trade is, To drink with noble lords and toast their ladies, Thou, Jacob Tonson, were to my conceiving, The cheerfullest, best, honest fellow living.”

Tonson moved from the Gray’s Inn Gateway in 1712 to his more celebrated bookshop in the Strand that stood on part of the present site of Somerset House. I hear that another old landmark connected with this prince of publishers is doomed to disappear, for the Upper Flask, in Heath Street, Hampstead, that was known in Tonson’s day as the “Upper Bowling Green House,” used as the summer quarters of the Kit-Cat Club, may have to give way to the new buildings of some philanthropic institution.

Gray’s Inn takes its name from the Grays of Wilton. There is a document registering the transferring in 1505 of the “Manor of Portpoole, otherwise called Gray’s Inn” from Edmund Lord Gray of Wilton to a Mr. Denny. The public, alas, are never admitted to the Gardens, but any visitor may see the Hall on a week-day between the hours of 10 and 12.15.

HATTON GARDEN

“My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn, I saw good strawberries in your garden there.” _Richard III._

Staple Inn and Gray’s Inn are not the only old-world souvenirs to be found in prosaic Holborn. A little further east, on the left-hand side as one strolls towards the City, lies another sordid street whose name is redolent of Elizabethan romance.

Hatton Garden, named after the queen’s handsome chancellor and now the haunt of the diamond and pearl merchant, and also of organgrinders and ice-cream vendors, is built on the site of the gardens of Ely Palace, the town house of the Bishops of Ely whose story is noted on another page. Round the corner is Ely Place, the most astonishing little square in London.

If you pass this spot on the stroke of the hour after ten o’clock on a summer’s evening, you may well rub your eyes and wonder if time has been rolled back and you are suddenly living in the London of two centuries ago. For the iron gates of the little place are closed, and out of the tiny porter’s lodge in the middle comes an important person with a gold-laced hat, who solemnly makes the tour of the square, crying five or six times, “Past ten o’clock and all’s well!”

The crying of the hours by the night watchman is not the only custom of this old-world corner, so carefully guarded by the commissioners in whose hands the rights of Ely Place are vested. The little square, now given over to law offices and business premises, was once a “sanctuary,” a place where law-breakers could take refuge and where the civil authorities had no right of arrest. To this day the caretakers who form the bulk of the resident population of Ely Place are inordinately proud of the fact that they are independent of police protection, having their own standing army of three porters, who take eight-hour turns in guarding the tranquillity of their self-contained domain.

They even have a public-house of their very own, for in the tiny passage that connects Ely Place with Hatton Garden is a dim little inn of dubious antiquity, that takes its name of the “Mitre” from the carved stone mitre set in the façade which once formed part of the old palace of the bishops of Ely. The innkeeper is very proud of the remains of a Methuselah of a cherry-tree now incorporated in one corner of the house. You can see the whitewashed remains of the tree that may have shaded good Queen Bess if you peer through the left-hand corner window.

At ten of the clock the iron gate leading into Hatton Garden is duly fastened, and the “Mitre” is closed to the outside world.

I have kept the best and most amazing of the treasures of Ely Place until the last.

Walk down the left-hand side of the square to the far corner, and you will find your way into one of the most beautiful things in London,--a thirteenth century chapel practically intact. It is so beautiful that if it were necessary to pay a high entrance fee or write for cards of admission, it would probably be the Mecca of every artist and antiquarian. But since it is in London, prodigal of such treasures, and anyone may walk in and look at its beauty undisturbed at any hour, St. Etheldreda’s Chapel is only known to a few people.

It was built in the last decade of the thirteenth century by a certain Bishop de Luda, as the chapel for Ely House, the town residence of the bishops of Ely.

John of Gaunt took refuge here and must have heard mass within these very walls. Shakespeare reminds us, in _Richard II._, of John of Gaunt’s death in Ely House, and it was in these cloisters that Henry VIII. first met with Cranmer. Queen Elizabeth’s chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton, worshipped here till his unlucky tenancy of Ely House was ended by his death in 1591, and so did his nephew’s imperious widow, the famous Lady Hatton who married and flouted Sir Edward Coke, the great lawyer and rival of Bacon for her hand.

It was at “Elie House in Holborne” in the reign of James I. that the last mystery play was represented in England, before the Spanish Ambassador Gondemar, who was a next-door neighbour to Ely Palace. The later history of the chapel may be briefly told. When the bishops finally sold the property to the Crown in 1772 and betook themselves to Dover Street, it was bought by an architect who preserved the chapel for the use of the residents of the houses he built in Ely Place. Afterwards it passed through several hands, being finally bought by the Fathers of Charity from the Welsh Episcopalians in 1871. When the work of restoration was finished, St. Etheldreda’s, the only pre-Reformation place of worship restored to the Roman Catholic Church, was reopened on St. Etheldreda’s Day, the 23rd of June, 1876.

ST. SEPULCHRE’S

“Here lies one conquered that hath conquered kings.” Epitaph to Capt. John Smith, 1631.

A little further along Holborn, in Giltspur Street, you come to the old Church of St. Sepulchre, where we meet again the Tyburn prisoners. Everybody who has heard the _Beggar’s Opera_ (and who has not?) will remember the picture Polly Peachum draws of Macheath on the road to Tyburn: “Methinks I see him already in the cart, sweeter and more lovely than the nosegay in his hand.” It was at St. Sepulchre’s that the amorous highwayman would have got his nosegay, on the steps of the church, for an old benefactor had left money to provide flowers for every criminal going to be hanged. It was St. Sepulchre’s bell that tolled the hour of their hanging, and another legacy provided for an admonition and prayers for the condemned.

There are more cheerful memories connected with the old church. There is a mention of it in the twelfth century records. It was rebuilt in the middle of the fifteenth century--the south-west porch still remains a thing of beauty--and after it was nearly destroyed in the Great Fire in 1666, Wren practically rebuilt the church with its four weathercocks, whose differences of opinion about the wind gave rise to the saying of Howell: “Unreasonable people are as hard to reconcile as the vanes of St. Sepulchre’s tower.”

Two very noteworthy Elizabethans lie buried in St. Sepulchre’s, one a scholar, the other a brilliant adventurer. The former was Roger Ascham, the queen’s tutor, and the latter, Captain John Smith, “sometime Governor of Virginia and Admiral of New England,” of Pocahontas fame. Captain Smith’s adventures in America have rather overshadowed his earlier exploits. Mr. Walter Thornbury, in his wonderful _Old and New London_, tells that he fought in Hungary in 1602, and in three single combats overcame three Turks and cut off their heads, for which and other equally brave deeds Sigismund, Duke of Transylvania, gave him his picture set in gold with a pension of three hundred ducats, and allowed him to bear three Turks’ heads proper as his shield of arms. Pocahontas, who you remember found the English climate too much for her, lies buried in the parish church of St. George, Gravesend. In 1914 the Society of Virginian Dames placed two stained glass windows to honour her memory.

STONE EFFIGIES

Not the least of the quaint things that the seeing eye may note in London streets are the small statues and reliefs that give an odd variety to some of the houses.

At No. 78, Newgate Street, five minutes’ walk from St. Sepulchre’s, and on the same side of the road, is a bas-relief (probably an old shop-sign) of a giant and a dwarf. These were William Evans and Sir Jeffery Hudson, freaks whom it pleased Charles II. to keep about him at the Court, as readers of _Peveril of the Peak_ will remember.

Just opposite is Panier Alley, so called from the basket-makers who once lived here. On the left, cased in glass in order to preserve it from the weather, is a somewhat battered effigy of a fat boy sitting upon a panier, and, underneath, this inscription:

When ye have sought the citty round, Yet still this is the highest ground. August the 27th, 1688.

It was put up a few years after the Great Fire, that landmark in the history of the City. I am told its claim is not strictly founded on fact, and that part of Cannon Street is a few feet higher, but one would like to believe the cherub.

Another bas-relief of a fat boy, at the corner of Cock Lane, even nearer to St. Sepulchre’s, I mention in another chapter, and there is a quaint old vintner’s sign of an infant Bacchus on a barrel, to be found at the junction of Liverpool Street and Manchester Street, in the rather depressing vicinity of King’s Cross. It is believed to be the only one of its kind left in London.