CHAPTER IX

A STROLL IN WHITEHALL AND WESTMINSTER

“And all that passes inter nos, May be proclaimed at Charing Cross.” SWIFT.

Dr. Johnson once said, “Why, sir, Fleet Street has a very animated appearance, but I think the full tide of human existence is at Charing Cross.”

Certainly Charing Cross is the best of all starting-points for exploring expeditions, and by Charing Cross I mean the south-east corner of Trafalgar Square.

From there you may wander along the Strand, or north into Bloomsbury, or through Cockspur Street into the realms of Mayfair, or southward to the Thames, and in every direction there are unnoticed stories to be found.

UNITED SERVICES MUSEUM

“More kindly love have I to that place than to any other in yerth.”--CHAUCER.

One day I turned my back on Charing Cross to go to St. Margaret’s _via_ Whitehall, blissfully unconscious of the fact that it happened to be Saturday and that the church closes its doors every day at 4 p.m. and for all day on Saturdays.

At the corner of the Horse Guards Avenue I paused undecided, having taken months to summon up courage to pass the giant at the entrance to the United Services Museum!

He snorts with such a supercilious sniff at the would-be visitor that you have to remember it may possibly be only the good-natured contempt of one service for another, and that the Orion’s figurehead may really be elevating his nose at the Horse Guards across the way, on which I notice that Spencer Compton, 8th Duke of Devonshire (b. 1833, d. 1908) also bends a grave and somewhat disapproving eye from his elevated statue in the middle of the road.

Mr. Street, in his delicious _Ghosts of Piccadilly_, says, “There is ever a Devonshire filling his eminent position, calm, retiring, imperturbable, and never an amusing thing to tell of any one of them,” and this statue tells you to believe him.

To come back to the United Services Museum--a thing that far too few people do, for it is one of London’s many buried treasures--don’t be misled by any optimistic guide-book that tells you the admission is sixpence. That is only true on Saturday afternoon; at other times you part with a shilling unless you are a soldier or sailor in uniform, or one of the many troops of schoolchildren that are admitted free every week.

There are myriads of things to delight any childish heart--cunningly contrived models of ships, plans of battles, the actual walking-stick and snuff-box of Sir Francis Drake, Oliver Cromwell’s sword, the very bugle that sounded the Charge of the Light Brigade, a room devoted to souvenirs of Lord Wolseley, and rows of other treasures with heroic stories of brave men.

I have yet to find a museum without a Napoleonic souvenir, and here there is a startling one--“Marengo’s” skeleton. You are so engrossed by the relics of General Wolfe and Nelson and Wellington and other heroes, that you almost forget what you came to see--the Old Banqueting Hall where they are lodged, the beautiful Palladian structure that Inigo Jones built in 1622--all that is now left of the old palace of Whitehall.

The nine ceiling paintings that Rubens did at Charles I.’s request look as fresh as if they had been painted yesterday, having been restored too many times. Rubens got £3000 for them, while Wren only received £100 a year for rebuilding all the City churches and £200 a year for rebuilding St. Paul’s--but Wren was an Englishman and Rubens a foreigner.

The Banqueting Hall was all that James I. accomplished of the great palace he meant to let Inigo Jones build for him in Whitehall, and just outside the hall Charles I. met his death, a short distance from the statue where

Comely and calm he rides Hard by his own Whitehall.

A little crowd clusters every morning at

eleven to see the guard relieved at the Horse Guards, now the office of the C.I.C. of the Home Forces.

On the king’s birthday, June 3rd, the Trooping of the Colour at the Horse Guards is an unforgettable pageant.

The English have not, like the French, the courteous custom of saluting their flag, but on this occasion every civilian head is bared as the drums beat and swords flash, and the uplifted colours are borne slowly round the parade ground to the strains of _God Save the King_ and the old regimental marches, played by the band of the Life Guards in their magnificent uniforms.

It is a gallant sight, and a goodly thing to see.

WESTMINSTER ABBEY

“It is a wonderful place ... a nation, not a city.”

Even more than of the British Museum I feel that it would be an impertinence to speak of Westminster Abbey as a London corner unnoticed by Londoners,--and yet I have known people who have left London and gone back across the seas with never a thought for the cloisters nor a “memorie” of Jane Lister, “dear childe,” who lies buried there, people who may have perfunctorily “done” the Abbey with a guide but have never lingered there at the uncrowded hours till the exquisite beauty of its many corners has become a possession they can carry away with them.

I can make no attempt to point out the manifold interest of the Abbey, but there are certain places that I love that I would not willingly let anyone miss.

There is no need to write of the interior. No one was ever known to miss the Poets’ Corner, or the Coronation Chair, or Henry VII.’s Chapel, or the Chapel of Edward the Confessor, but I have known people who visited Westminster Abbey and missed seeing the Chapter House.

To miss seeing that thirteenth-century octagonal room is a calamity. It is not only very beautiful, with a beauty that reminds you at once of the Sainte Chapelle, but there is an atmosphere about it that takes you back through the centuries to the time when Simon de Montfort was laying the foundations of constitutional government, and the first parliament of twenty-three barons, one hundred and twenty ecclesiastics, two knights from each shire and two burghers from each town met in this very room.

The House of Commons was born within these grey walls nearly five and a half centuries ago, when the Commons were told to go to “leur ancienne place en la maison du Chapitre de l’Abbeye de Westminster.” The members met here till they moved to the Chapel of St. Stephen, within the walls of Westminster Palace, in 1547.

Turn your back on the ugly cases of the seals

and charters that should have been removed to the Record Office with the rest of the public records that were stored here since Elizabethan days, and look instead at the faint fourteenth-century mural decoration of Christ surrounded by the Christian virtues. Even the unsightly cases cannot destroy the sense of the lovely proportions of the shaft-supported roof and the arcaded walls with the six noble windows, filled with glass none the less beautiful because it happens to be modern, and all the more interesting because it honours the memory of that great lover of Westminster, Dean Stanley.

When Edward the Confessor about 1050 built the first round Chapter House on this spot for his Benedictine monks to transact the business of their monastery, they little thought to what varied uses it would be put. The present octagonal room has seen the age-long struggle of the people for their liberties. It was damaged in the Civil Wars and suffered from repairs in the eighteenth century. It has had its painted walls concealed by unsightly cupboards, when the public records were stored there. It has housed the Domesday Book till it and the records were removed in 1862, and now that it has been restored as nearly as possible to its old beauty, it exists, spacious and dignified as ever, to remind the passing visitor of the value of tradition and the history of a great nation.

A few steps farther along the cloister is another less well-known corner, the Chapel of the Pyx--not so ecclesiastical a chamber as it sounds, “pyx” meaning only a chest or box where the standard of references for testing the coins of the realm used to be kept. Nowadays they make these tests at the hall of the ancient Company of Goldsmiths, at the corner of Foster Lane and Gresham Street.

Long ago the king’s treasure was kept here, and only the king and my Lord Chancellor and the Abbot of Westminster had the keys, a fact that was very inconvenient when a robbery occurred, as at least one abbot found to his cost. He and forty of his monks saw the inside of the Tower in consequence, but punishment was not always so light, as the pieces of human skin still to be seen nailed to the door will show.

Inside the seven-locked door with its gruesome lining, that is only opened to visitors on Tuesdays and Fridays, you find a low vaulted room supported by rounded Romanesque arches on thick short pillars, and a stone altar--the earliest in the Abbey.

After leaving the Chapel of the Pyx, stroll along the Norman cloister to the left, past the Norman undercroft, where, if you have a mind to pay a small fee to the verger in the Poets’ Corner, you can see any day in the week the quaint effigies that used to be carried at royal funerals. Through the dark entry you come to the Little Cloister, a part of the old monastery, that ought only to be seen on a hot summer’s day, for in the winter-time it is dreary and your thoughts tend to turn to the smug ingratitude that allowed the woman Nelson loved to die in poverty,--for she once lived in the tower built by Abbot Littlington and originally the bell tower of the church.

Turn back through the south walk of the Great Cloister and come into the Deanery Yard.

It is customary to write to the dean for permission to see the Jerusalem Chamber, but, if you go without this formality and he happens to be absent, the caretaker will show it to you and tell quite unique stories which I will not steal his thunder by repeating.

You go through the sixteenth-century Jericho Room first, and it too is interesting, with its linenfold deal panelling. It is the ante-room to the Jerusalem Chamber, and is now used as a sort of vestry room for the cathedral. In the Jerusalem Chamber, as every schoolboy knows, King Henry IV. died in 1413. I refuse to quote Shakespeare on this occasion. It is a fine fourteenth-century cedar-panelled room, and the light through fragments of very ancient glass in the windows shines on early seventeenth-century tapestries and a very old mediæval portrait of Richard II. It is a gracious place, but when the authors of the Revised Version of the Bible worked here in 1870, it failed to inspire them with the same sense of the beauty of words that made their predecessors produce the finest literature in the world.

Many famous men have lain in state in the Jerusalem Room before their interment in the Abbey--Congreve and Addison were both honoured in this way, and that seventeenth-century poet-diplomatist, Matthew Prior, who was so esteemed by Louis XIV. that he sent him a bust by the great Coysevox. With one of those piquant inconsistencies that enliven history, Nance Oldfield, Mrs. Bracegirdle’s rival, also lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber before she was buried in the Abbey. Mrs. Bracegirdle lies in front of the entrance to the Chapter House, but Nance Oldfield was the only actress honoured by burial within the Abbey walls.

The Jerusalem Chamber was originally the drawing-room of the Abbot of Westminster, and in James the First’s day a banquet was given here to the French Ambassadors who came over to arrange the marriage of Prince Charles and the daughter of Henri IV.

ASHBURNHAM HOUSE

“If ever princess put all princes down, For temperance, prowess, prudence, equity; This, this was she, that, in despite of death, Lives still admired, adored, Elizabeth!” ANON.

Coming out of Dean’s Court and passing through the gateway in the east side of Dean’s Yard, you find another enticing and little-known corner in Westminster School in Little Dean’s Yard.

Every monastery had to have its school, so the monks of St. Peter’s started theirs--the forerunner of the Westminster School or St. Peter’s College founded by Queen Elizabeth in 1560. Ben Jonson went to school here, and so did George Herbert and Dryden and Cowper and Southey, Hakluyt of _Voyages_ fame, and Wren and Locke and Warren Hastings and many other famous men I do not know, including Prior.

The school sergeant at the lodge will show the Edward III. College Hall, with its minstrel gallery and oaken tables made from the beams of the Spanish Armada. Forty years ago the school annexed Ashburnham House, another interesting unnoticed corner that can be seen any Saturday afternoon, on application to the hall porter. This charming house was built in the seventeenth century by Webb, a famous disciple of Inigo Jones. Alas, his celebrated staircase is given over to dust and spiders, and only restored to a semblance of its former beauty on state occasions, such as Founders’ Day in November or at Christmas, when the boys perform their well-known Latin plays.

There are many interesting things about the school and the buildings that I leave untold, so go and see for yourself this quiet backwater of London.

ST. MARGARET’S CHURCH

“That, if I chance to hold my peace, These stones to praise Thee may not cease.” GEORGE HERBERT.

St. Margaret’s Church, open till four except on a Saturday, is interesting not only for its architectural beauty, but for its many associations, and since 1916 it has had a deepened interest for the British Dominions beyond the Seas, as it was then created their parish church.

Pepys, who simply refuses to be left out of anything, was married here to his pretty wife, of whom he was so proud that she need not have been jealous of Mrs. Knipp.

In the chancel lies Sir Walter Raleigh, buried in St. Margaret’s after his execution in front of Westminster Palace in 1618. Admiral Blake lies in the churchyard, and there is a fine window in his honour on the north side.

The celebrated east window has had a career that is not without its comic side. It was originally sent over to England by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain as a betrothal gift to Prince Arthur, the eldest son of Henry VII., with whom they had arranged the marriage of their daughter Catherine.

Before the window arrived the bridegroom had died, and Henry VIII., who married the bride, did not want a window with a portrait of Prince Arthur and Catherine. He sent it to Waltham Abbey, and from that time its history is a moving one.

At the dissolution of the monasteries, the last abbot sent the window to New Hall in Essex, later bought by the Villiers family, who buried it. At the Restoration General Monk set it up again till its next owner took it down, and had the window packed away in a case till he found a purchaser for fifteen guineas. In 1758 the churchwardens of St. Margaret’s bought back the window for four hundred guineas, but its troubles were not ended.

The Dean and Chapter of Westminster thought the window a superstitious image, and it was only after a lawsuit lasting seven years that the churchwardens were allowed to keep their window.

As usual, I have not told of half the beauty and interest of this fifteenth-century parish church, only of enough, I hope, to make a reader go and discover the rest for himself, but let him take thought to go before four o’clock and not on a Saturday.