Loitering in Pleasant Paths. Marion Harland
to American descendants, were our nursery tales. For him whose love of sea and wildwood was a passion captivity nor courts could tame, his burial-place is a sorry one, although esteemed honorable. I think he would have chosen rather an unknown grave upon the border of the Chickahominy or James, the stars, that had guided him through swamp and desert, for tapers, instead of organ-thrill and incense, the song of mockingbirds and scent of pine woods. The more one knows and thinks and sees of St. Sepulchre’s the less tolerant is he of it as a spot of sepulture for this gallant and true knight. They interred him there because it was his parish church. But they—the English—are not backward in removing other people’s bones when it suits their pride or convenience to do so. In the square tower, lately restored, hangs the bell that has tolled for two hundred years when the condemned passed out of the little iron gate we had just seen. They used to hang them at Tyburn, afterward in the street before the prison. Now, executions take place privately within the Newgate walls. In the brave old times, when refinement of torture was appreciated more highly than now as a means of grace and a Christian art, the criminal had the privilege of hearing his own funeral sermon—which was rarely, we may infer, a panegyric—seated upon his coffin in the broad aisle of St. Sepulchre’s. There was a plat of flowers then in the tiny yard where the grass cannot sprout now for the coal-dust, and as the poor creature took his place—the service done—upon the coffin in the cart that was to take him to the gallows, a child was put forward to present him with a bouquet of blossoms grown under the droppings of the sanctuary. What manner of herbs could they have been? Rue, rosemary, life-everlasting? Yet they may have had their message to the dim eyes that looked down upon them—for the quailing human heart—of the Father’s love for the lowest and vilest of His created things.
“Temple Bar!” was our next order.
Before we reached it our driver checked his horse of his own accord, got down from his perch at the back, and presented his weather-beaten face at my side.
“I’ve thocht”—respectfully, and with unction learned in the “kirk”—“that it might eenterest the leddies to know that this is the square where mony hundreds of men, wimmen, and, one may say, eenfants, were burrned alive for the sake of the Faith.”
And in saying it, he lifted his hat quite from his head in reverence, we were touched to note, was not meant for us, but as a tribute to those of whom the world was not worthy.
“Smithfield!” we cried in a breath. “Oh! let us get out!”
It is a hollow square, a small, railed-in garden and fountain in the middle; around these extends on three sides an immense market, the pride of modern London, a structure of much pretension, with four towers and a roof, like that of a conservatory, of glass and iron, supported by iron pillars. A very Babel of buying and selling, of hawkers’ and carters’ yells, at that early hour of the day. The stake was near the fine old church of St. Bartholomew, which faces the open space. Excepting the ancient temple, founded in 1102, there is no vestige of the Smithfield (Smooth-field) where Wallace was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1305; where the “Gentle Mortimer” of a royal paramour was beheaded in 1330, and, in the reign of Mary I., the “Good Catholic,” three hundred of her subjects, John Rogers and Bradford among them, were burned with as little scruple as the white-aproned butcher in the market-stall near by slices off a prime steak for a customer. The church has been several times restored, but the Norman tower bears the date 1628. It, too, felt the Great Fire, and the heat and smoke of crueller flames, in the midst of which One like unto the Son of Man walked with His children. Against the walls was built the stage for the accommodation of the Lord Mayor of London, the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Bedford, that they might, at their ease, behold Anne Askew burn. They were in too prudent dread of the explosion of the powder-bag tied about her waist to sit near enough to hear her say to the sheriff’s offer of pardon if she would recant—“I came not hither to deny my Lord!”
St. Bartholomew the Great stands yet in Smithfield. Above it bow the heavens that opened to receive the souls born into immortality through the travail of that bloody reign. Forty years ago, they were digging in the ground in front of the church to lay pavements, or gas-pipes, or water-mains, or some other nineteenth-century device, and the picks struck into a mass of charred human bones.
“Unknown!” Stephen Gardiner and his helpers had a brisk run of business between St. Andrew’s Day, 1554, and November 17, 1558. There was no time to gather up the fragments. Ah, well! God and His angels knew where was buried the precious seed of the Church.
How the cockles of our canny Scot’s heart warmed toward us when he perceived that he and we were of one mind anent Smithfield! that we took in, without cavil, the breadth and depth of his words—“The Faith!” During that busy four years tender women, girls and babes in age proved, with strong men, what it meant to “earnestly contend for” it.
In a gush of confidence induced by the kinship of sentiment upon this point, we told our friend what we wanted to see in the city, that day, and why, and found him wonderfully versed in other matters besides martyrology. He named a dozen places of interest not upon our schedule, and volunteered to call out the names of noted localities through the loop-hole overhead, as we passed them. This arrangement insured the success of our escapade, for his judicious selection of routes, so as to waste no time in barren neighborhoods, was only surpassed by the quality of the pellets of information dropped into our ears.
St. John’s gate was, in aspect, the most venerable relic we saw in London. They told us in the office at the gateway that it and the Priory—now destroyed—were built in 1111; but recollecting that the Pope’s confirmation of the first constitution of the Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem bore date of 1113, we nursed some unspoken doubts. The prior who finished the building in 1504 modestly left his family coat-of-arms upon the wall of the small entrance-room, now used as an office. This black and bruised arch marks what was the rallying-point of British chivalry and piety during three crusades. Out of this gate the Hospitaliers drew forth in mingled martial and ecclesiastical array—white gown with the red cross on shoulder, over hauberk and greaves—at each departure for the Holy Land. Godfrey de Bouillon was an influential member and patron of the Order. Henry VIII. scattered the brethren and pocketed their revenues. His daughter Mary reinstated them in their home and privileges. Her sister Elizabeth would none of them, and that was an end of the controversy, for she lived long enough to enforce her decree.
Cave’s “Gentleman’s Magazine” was published here when gentlemen ceased to ride, booted, spurred, and illiterate, upon the crusades against the Saracen. Johnson, a slovenly provincial usher, having failed as translator and schoolmaster to make a living, applied for, and received from this periodical literary employment—the first paying engagement of his life. For more than a dozen years he was a contributor to the Magazine, and the office above the gate was his favorite lounging-place. As a proof of this they show a chair, ungainly and unclean enough to have been used by him throughout the period of his contributorship.
East of St. John’s Gate we passed a disused intramural cemetery, begloomed on all sides by rows of dingy houses. The rain of “blacks” incessantly descending upon the metropolis collects here in unstirred, sable sheets. Such a pall enfolds the graves of Isaac Watts and Daniel Defoe, whose “Diary of the Great Plague” is a work of more dramatic power than his Robinson Crusoe. A stone’s throw apart from hymnster and romancist, lies a greater than either—the prince of dreamers, John Bunyan.
Temple Bar is—or was, for it has been pulled down since we were there—an arch of Portland stone, and is attributed, I hope, erroneously, to Christopher Wren. Without this information I should have said that it was a wooden structure, badly hacked, gnawed, and besmirched by time, with dirty plaster statues of the two Charleses niched upon one side, and, upon the other, corresponding figures of James I. and Elizabeth. It was much lower than we had supposed, and than it is represented in pictures, and just wide enough to allow two coaches to pass abreast without collision. The roaring tide overflowing the Strand and Fleet Street appeared to squeeze through with difficulty. Above the gate was a row of one-story offices—mere boxes—such as are occupied in our country by newspaper-venders. Within the memory of living men the top of the gate was a thick-set hedge of spikes, reckoned, not very many years back, as one of the bulwarks of English