Highways and Byways in London. Emily Constance Baird Cook
But St. Bartholomew's precincts are not the only "haunts of peace" in this noisy neighbourhood. Crossing the Metropolitan Meat Market, and picking your way northward, through innumerable ugly tram-lines, you presently reach the quiet and restful Charterhouse Square, whence, through an archway, the precincts of the ancient monastery are entered. Charterhouse Square, once an enclosure of seventeenth-century palaces, is a delightful old place even yet; though its sober residential look of time-darkened red brick is now but a blind, and it is rapidly becoming a square of hotels and lodging-houses. Such a fate was, of course, inevitable in its case; and yet it seems mournful. The spot where Rutland House, the ancient residence of the Venetian ambassador, once stood, is only commemorated now in the name of Rutland Place. The City palaces have crumbled; they have all been rebuilt in the far West; and even Bloomsbury has none left, except those which are devoted to the modern flat! One of the prettiest houses now to be seen in the present Charterhouse Square,—its front trellised over with bright Virginian creeper, such a house as Miss Thackeray loved to describe,—is now a "home" fitted up by a big city warehouse for the accommodation of its working girls. The square garden is still nicely kept; Janus-faced, it looks on to the world's noisy mart on the one side, and, on the other, towards conventual peace.
But you must not linger in Charterhouse Square; time is passing, and the archway leading to the ancient sanctuary invites you. The guide-books tell you that this archway is in the "Perpendicular" style; that its projecting shelf above is supported by lions; this and much more; but you do not always feel in a mood to digest guide-books. They are so aggressive in their information, and so distracting to one's own thoughts! For, how many associations does not this classic abode recall! You can easily imagine groups of tonsured, cowled friars, standing here and there in the shadows of the quadrangles; one "grey friar" of a later time, with "the order of the Bath on his breast," perhaps, most of all.
This Carthusian monastery, so powerful in mediæval times, and founded by Sir Walter Manny as early as 1321, was suppressed by the rapacity of Henry VIII., that brutal though necessary reformer. The story of the dissolution is a cruel and heartrending one. Prior Houghton, the last superior of the monastery, protested against the king's spoliation of Church lands; he was promptly convicted of high treason, and, with several of his monks, was "hanged, drawn, and quartered" at Tyburn. They died gallantly, and in their deaths we revere that true and sturdy spirit that still in our own day leads England on to glory:
"If" (says Froude) "we would understand the true spirit of the time, we must regard Catholics and Protestants as gallant soldiers, whose deaths, when they fall, are not painful, but glorious; and whose devotion we are equally able to admire, even where we cannot equally approve their cause. Courage and self-sacrifice are beautiful alike in an enemy and in a friend. And while we exult in that chivalry with which the Smithfield martyrs bought England's freedom with their blood, so we will not refuse our admiration to those other gallant men whose high forms, in the sunset of the old faith, stand transfigured on the horizon, tinged with the light of its dying glory."
Prior Houghton's bloody arm, severed from his murdered corpse, was hung up over the gateway of his sanctuary, to awe his remaining monks into obedience; while his head was exposed on London Bridge. Brutal, indeed, were our forefathers of the Tudor time!
The Charterhouse, after the banishment and death of its monks, passed through the hands of several of the king's favourites, and came eventually into those of the Duke of Norfolk, who altered it considerably, making it less monastic and more palatial in character. But a new era of usefulness awaited the ancient convent; better days for it were at hand. For it was finally sold by the Norfolk family to one Thomas Sutton, a rich and philanthropic Northumbrian coal-owner, who converted it into a "Hospital" for eighty poor men, and a school for forty poor boys. The school, so picturesque in Thackeray's Newcomes, no longer exists here as in old days; in 1872, the modern craze for fresh air transferred it to new premises at Godalming; and the boys' vacated buildings were sold to the Merchant Taylors' Company for their own school. The almshouses for the poor brothers remain, however, just as they were. Times change, and, though the aged bedesmen are yet poor, it is doubtful whether all the boys who benefit from the foundation, can still be called so. The school, like other foundations of its kind, probably now benefits a higher class than old Thomas Sutton intended.
Many noted men have been pupils of the Charterhouse; Thackeray, especially, has immortalised his old school in his touching description of "Founder's Day"; when old Colonel Newcome, in his turn both pupil and poor brother, sits humbly among the aged pensioners, clad in his black gown:
"I chanced to look up from my book towards the swarm of black-coated pensioners: and amongst them—amongst them—sate Thomas Newcome. His dear old head was bent down over his prayer-book; there was no mistaking him. He wore the black gown of the pensioners of the Hospital of Grey Friars. His order of the Bath was on his breast. He stood there amongst the poor brethren, uttering the responses to the psalm.... I heard no more of prayers, and psalms, and sermon, after that."
The whole of the Charterhouse breathes the old man's spirit; is perambulated by his frail ghost, the shadow of a Grey Friar. The letters, "I.H." worked out in red on the bricks in Washhouse Court, (part of the old monastery), though supposed to show the initials of the martyred Prior Houghton, are not so vivid to us as the little house in the same court, pointed out as the place where Colonel Newcome died!
Ghosts there may be in the Charterhouse, but their identity is not divulged. "Some people," the porter owns, under pressure, "have been known to see strange things," though he for his part has only come across rats, so far. Perhaps the boys have "laid" them! boys, it must be confessed, would make short work of most ghosts. The boys, on the "Founder's Day" mentioned by Thackeray, used always to sing the Carthusian chorus in the old merchant's honour:
"Then blessed be the memory
Of good old Thomas Sutton,
Who gave us lodging, learning,
As well as beef and mutton."
They sing it still, no doubt, equally heartily at Godalming; yet, surely, some among them must yearn for the historic associations of the old place. But, indeed, all the ancient schools are going, or gone, from the City; St. Paul's School is moved to Hammersmith; the picturesque Christ's Hospital is just disintegrated; its characteristic Lares and Penates are removed to Horsham; and the passengers along noisy Newgate Street will no longer stay to enjoy the romps and the foot-ball of the yellow-legged, blue-coated boys.
The brick courts of the Charterhouse have a solid and collegiate air; its small Jacobean chapel, of which the groined entrance alone dates from monastic times, contains a splendid alabaster tomb of the Founder. Here is Thackeray's striking description of a "Founder's Day" service:
"The boys are already in their seats, with smug fresh faces, and shining white collars; the old black-gowned pensioners are on their benches; the chapel is lighted, and Founder's Tomb, with its grotesque carvings, monsters, heraldries, darkles and shines with the most wonderful shadows and lights. There he lies, Foundator Noster, in his ruff and gown, awaiting the great Examination Day.... Yonder sit forty cherry-cheeked boys, thinking about home and holidays to-morrow. Yonder sit some three-score old gentlemen of the hospital, listening to the prayers and the psalms. You hear them coughing feebly in the twilight,—the old reverend blackgowns.... A plenty of candles lights up this chapel, and this scene of age and youth, and early memories, and pompous death. How solemn the well-remembered prayers are, here uttered again in the place where in childhood we used to hear them! How beautiful and decorous the rite; how noble the ancient words of the supplications which the priest utters, and to which generations of fresh children, and troops of bygone seniors have cried Amen! under those arches! The service for Founder's Day is a special one; one of the psalms selected being the thirty-seventh, and we hear—'v. 23. The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and he delighteth in his way. 24. Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the Lord upholdeth him with his hand. 25. I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread."
The Carthusians, as visitors to the monastery of the "Grande Chartreuse" already know, lived almost entirely in small houses of their own. These exist here no longer, but the ancient brick