Old St. Paul's Cathedral Part 2

He was buried against the wall of the North Aisle, not far from John of Gaunt.

ROGER NIGER, bishop from 1228 to 1241, was buried under the fifth bay of the Choir, between it and the North Aisle. There were three inscriptions on his tomb, the first on the aisle side:

"Ecclesiae quondam Praesul praesentis, in anno M bis C quater X jacet hic Rogerus humatus: Hujus erat manibus Domino locus iste dicatus: Christe, suis precibus veniam des; tolle reatus."

Then we have a short biography in laudatory terms, and below that a record which one may translate as it stands: "It came to pa.s.s while this Bishop Roger stood mitred [infulatus] before the high altar, ready to begin the Divine mysteries, there came on such a dense cloud that men could scarcely discern one another; and presently a fearful clap of thunder followed, and such a blaze of lightning and intolerable smell, that all who stood by fled hastily, expecting nothing less than death. The Bishop and one deacon only bravely remained, and when the air was at length purified the Bishop completed the service." We shall have more about this storm hereafter.

SIR JOHN MASON (1503-1566), the son of a cowherd at Abingdon, and afterwards a great benefactor to that town. His mother was a sister to the Abbot of Abingdon, and through this relations.h.i.+p he was educated at Oxford, became a Fellow of All Souls', took orders, and, in consequence of the skill which he displayed in diplomacy and international law, received rich Church preferments, among them the Deanery of Winchester. At the accession of Queen Mary he had to relinquish this, but as he had been faithful to her, she showed him much favour, and gave him some secular offices. On the accession of Elizabeth, he returned to his Deanery, and was all his life one of the most trusted of the Queen's councillors, especially in foreign matters.

DR. WILLIAM AUBREY was appointed Vicar-General of Canterbury by Archbishop Grindal, and was esteemed a great lawyer in his time. He was the grandfather of the famous antiquary (d. 1595).

Crossing the Choir, and beginning from the west, we will now proceed eastward along the South Aisle of the Choir. First, we come to two famous Deans, Donne and Colet, the account of whom belongs to a subsequent page. In fact, the greater number of monuments in this aisle are of later date than the others, but it will be more convenient to take them here, excepting those which are connected with the subsequent history. The wall monument of WILLIAM HEWIT (arms, a fesse engrailed between three owls) had a rec.u.mbent figure of him in a layman's gown. He died in 1599.

SIR WILLIAM c.o.kAYNE (d. 1626) was a very rich Lord Mayor; high in the confidence of James I., who constantly consulted him on business. He was a munificent contributor to good works. It was said of him that "his spreading boughs gave shelter to some of the goodliest families in England." From his daughters descended the Earls of Nottingham, Pomfret, Holderness, Mulgrave, and Dover; the Duke of Ancaster, and the Viscounts Fanshawe.

JOHN NEWCOURT, Dean of Auckland, Canon of St. Paul's, Doctor of Law (d. 1485).

The handsome bra.s.s of ROGER BRABAZON, Canon of St. Paul's (d. 1498), had a figure in a cope. At the foot was the scroll, "Nunc Christe, te petimus, miserere quaesumus: Qui venisti redimere perditos, noli d.a.m.nare redemptos."

Pa.s.sing into the south side of the Lady Chapel, we come to two more mediaeval Bishops of London: HENRY WENGHAM (1259-1262). He was Chancellor to Henry III. Close to him was EUSTACE FAUCONBRIDGE, a Royal Justiciary, and afterwards High Treasurer, and Bishop of London, 1221-1228.

WILLIAM RYTHYN, LL.D., was Rector of St. Faith's and Minor Canon of the Cathedral (d. 1400).

RICHARD LYCHFIELD, Archdeacon both of Middles.e.x and of Bath, Canon Residentiary of St. Paul's (d. 1496).

The tomb of SIR NICHOLAS BACON (1509-1579), Queen Elizabeth's famous minister, and father of the great philosopher, had his rec.u.mbent figure, and those of his two wives, Jane, daughter of William Fernley, and Ann, daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke. The latter was the mother of Francis. The Latin inscription on the tomb was most laudatory, and reads as if it came from the same pen that wrote the dedication of the _Advancement of Learning_.

Another of the Elizabethan worthies is SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM (d.

April 6th, 1590). The monument to him was placed on the wall, with a long Latin biographical inscription and twenty lines of English verse.

Two other wall tablets in the same chapel commemorated other heroes of that period. SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, who died of his wound at Arnhem, October 15th, 1586, was buried in St. Paul's, with signs of public grief almost unparalleled. "It was accounted sin for months afterwards for any gentleman to appear in London streets in gay apparel." The tablet to him was of wood, and bore the following inscription:--

"England, Netherlands, the Heavens and the Arts, The Soldiers, and the World, have made six parts Of n.o.ble Sidney; for none will suppose That a small heap of stones can Sidney enclose.

His body hath England, for she it bred, Netherlands his blood, in her defence shed, The Heavens have his soul, the Arts have his fame, All soldiers the grief, the World his good name."

Close to this, on the same pillar, was a tablet to SIR THOMAS BASKERVILLE, who had also done good service as a brave soldier, according to the account given in fourteen lines of verse, which, it must be said, are a great deal more musical than Sidney's.

SIR CHRISTOPHER HATTON (1540-1591) had a finer monument than any of the other Elizabethan celebrities. Whether he deserved it is another matter. He was clever and handsome, and got into special favour with the Queen by his graceful dancing. He even wrote her amorous letters.

The part he took in procuring the condemnation of the Queen of Scots is well known.

At the extreme end of St. Dunstan's Chapel we come to another Mediaeval worthy.

HENRY DE LACY, EARL OF LINCOLN (1249-1311), "the closest councillor of Edward I." (Bishop Stubbs), was somewhat doubtful in his loyalty to Edward II., being divided between his grateful memory of the father and his disgust at the conduct of the son. His house was on the site of Lincoln's Inn, which owes its name to him. He was a munificent contributor to the "new work" of St. Paul's, and was buried in St.

Dunstan's Chapel, on the south side of the Lady Chapel.

[Footnote 1: "Here lieth Sebba, King of the East Saxons, who was converted to the faith by Erkenwald, Bishop of London, in the year of Christ 677. A man much devoted to G.o.d, greatly occupied in religious acts, frequent prayers, and pious fruits of almsgiving, preferring a private and monastic life to all the riches and honours of the kingdom, who, when he had reigned 30 years, received the religious habit at the hands of Walther, Bishop of London, who succeeded the aforesaid Erkenwald, of whom the Venerable Bede makes mention in his History of the English People."]

[Footnote 2: "Here lieth Ethelred, King of the English, son of King Edgar, to whom, on the day of his hallowing, St. Dunstan, the archbishop, after placing the crown upon him, is said to have foretold terrible things in these words: Forasmuch as thou hast aspired to the Kingdom through the death of thy brother, against whom the English have conspired along with thy wretched mother, the sword shall not depart from thy house, raging against thee all the days of thy life, destroying thy seed until the day when thy Kingdom shall be conveyed to another Kingdom whose customs and language the race over whom thou rulest knoweth not; nor shall there be expiation save by long-continued penalty of the sin of thyself, of thy mother, and of those men who took part in that shameful deed. Which things came to pa.s.s even as that holy man foretold; for Ethelred being worn out and put to flight in many battles by Sweyn, King of the Danes, and his son c.n.u.t, and at last, closely besieged in London, died miserably in the year of the Incarnation 1017, after a reign of 36 years of great tribulation."]

CHAPTER IV.

HISTORICAL MEMORIES TO THE ACCESSION OF THE TUDORS.

_The First Cathedral_--_Mellitus and his Troubles_--_Erkenwald_ --_Theodred_ "_the Good_"--_William the Norman, his Epitaph_ --_The Second Cathedral_--_Lanfranc and Anselm hold Councils in it_--_Bishop Foliot and Dean Diceto_--_FitzOsbert_--_King John's Evil Reign, his Va.s.salage_--_Henry III.'s Weak and Mischievous Reign_--_The Cardinal Legate in St. Paul's_--_Bishop Roger_ "_the Black_"--_The three Edwards, Importance of the Cathedral in their Times_--_Alderman Sely's Irregularity_--_Wyclif at St. Paul's_ --_Time of the Wars of the Roses_--_Marriage of Prince Arthur._

I have already said that the buildings of the ancient cathedral, with a special exception to be considered hereafter, were completed before the great ecclesiastical changes of the sixteenth century.

Our next subject will be some history of the events which the cathedral witnessed from time to time during its existence, and for this we have to go back to the very beginning, to the first simple building, whatever it was, in which the first bishop, Mellitus, began his ministry. He founded the church in 604, and he had troubled times.

The sons of his patron, King Sebert, relapsed into paganism, indeed they had never forsaken it, though so long as their father lived they had abstained from heathen rites. One day, entering the church, they saw the bishop celebrating the Sacrament, and said, "Give us some of that white bread which you gave our father." Mellitus replied that they could not receive it before they were baptized; whereupon they furiously exclaimed that he should not stay among them. In terror he fled abroad, as did Justus from Rochester, and as Laurence would have done from Canterbury, had he not received a Divine warning. Kent soon returned to the faith which it had abandoned; but Ess.e.x for a while remained heathen, and when Mellitus wished to return they refused him, and he succeeded Laurence at Canterbury. Other bishops ministered to the Christians as well as they could; but the authority of the See and the services of the cathedral were restored by Erkenwald, one of the n.o.blest of English prelates, son of Offa, King of East Anglia. He founded the two great monasteries of Chertsey and Barking, ruled the first himself, and set his sister Ethelburga over the other. In 675 he was taken from his abbey and consecrated fourth Bishop of London by Archbishop Theodore, and held the See until 693. He was a man, by universal consent, of saintly life and vast energy. He left his mark by strengthening the city wall and building the gate, which is called after him Bishopsgate. Close by is the church which bears the name of his sister, St. Ethelburga. He converted King Sebba to the faith; but it was probably because of his beneficent deeds to the Londoners that he was second only to Becket in the popular estimate, all over southern England. There were pilgrimages from the country around to his shrine in the cathedral, special services on his day, and special hymns. In fact, as in the case of St. Edward, there were two days dedicated to him, that of his death, April 30, and that of his translation, November 14, and these days were cla.s.sed in London among the high festivals. His costly shrine was at the back of the screen behind the high altar. The inscription upon it, besides enumerating the good deeds we have named, said that he added largely to the n.o.ble buildings of the cathedral, greatly enriched its revenues, and obtained for it many privileges from kings. His name, so far as its etymology is concerned, found its repet.i.tion in _Archibald_, Bishop of London, 1856-1868, the founder of the "Bishop of London's Fund."

Another bishop of these early times was Theodred, who was named "the Good." We cannot give the exact dates of his episcopate, further than that he was in the See in the middle of the tenth century, as is shown by some charters that he witnessed. There is a pathetic story told of him that on his way from London to join King Athelstan in the north he came to St. Edmund's Bury, and found some men who were charged with robbing the shrine of St. Edmund, and were detected by the Saint's miraculous interference. The bishop ordered them to be hanged; but the uncanonical act weighed so heavily on his conscience that he performed a lifelong penance, and as an expiation reared a splendid shrine over the saint's body. And further, he persuaded the King to decree, in a Witanagemote, that no one younger than fifteen should be put to death for theft. The bishop was buried in the crypt of St. Paul's, and the story was often told at his tomb, which was much frequented by the citizens, of his error and his life-long sorrow.

Another bishop who had been placed in the See by Edward the Confessor, who, it will be remembered, greatly favoured Normans, to the indignation of the English people, was known as "William the Norman,"

and, unpopular as the appointment may have been, it did the English good service. For when the Norman Conquest came the Londoners, for a while, were in fierce antagonism, and it might have gone hard with them. But Bishop William was known to the Conqueror, and had, in fact, been his chaplain, and it was by his intercession that he not only made friends with them, but gave them the charter still to be seen at the Guildhall. His monument was in the nave, towards the west end, and told that he was "vir sapientia et vitae sanct.i.tate clarus." He was bishop for twenty years, and died in 1075. The following tribute on the stone is worth preserving:--

"Haec tibi, clare Pater, posuerunt marmora cives, Praemia non meritis aequiparanda tuis: Namque sibi populus te Londoniensis amic.u.m Sensit, et huic urbi non leve presidium: Reddita Libertas, duce te, donataque multis, Te duce, res fuerat publica muneribus.

Divitias, genus, et formam brevis opprimat hora, Haec tua sed pietas et benefacta manent."[1]

To his shrine also an annual pilgrimage was made, and Lord Mayor Barkham, on renewing the above inscription A.D. 1622, puts in a word for himself:

"This being by Barkham's thankful mind renewed, Call it the monument of grat.i.tude."

We pa.s.s on to the time of the "second church," the Old St. Paul's which is the subject of this monograph.

The importance of London had been growing without interruption ever since its restoration by King Alfred, and it had risen to its position as the capital city. This largely showed itself when Archbishop Lanfranc, in 1075, held a great council in St. Paul's, "the first full Ecclesiastical Parliament of England," Dean Milman calls it. Up to that time, secular and Church matters had been settled in the same a.s.sembly, but this meeting, held with the King's sanction, and simultaneously with the Witan, or Parliament, established distinct courts for the trial of ecclesiastical causes. It decreed that no bishop or archdeacon should sit in the s.h.i.+remote or hundred-mote, and that no layman should try causes pertaining to the cure of souls.

The same council removed some episcopal sees from villages to towns, Selsey to Chichester, Elmham first to Thetford, then to Norwich, Sherburn to Old Sarum, Dorchester-on-Thame to Lincoln.

Another council of the great men met in St. Paul's in the course of the dispute between Henry I. and Anselm about the invest.i.tures, but it ended in a deadlock, and a fresh appeal to the Pope.

In the fierce struggle between Henry II. and Archbishop Becket, Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of London, while apparently quite honest in his desire to uphold the rights of the Church, also remained in favour with the King, and hoped to bring about peace. Becket regarded Foliot as his bitter enemy, and, whilst the latter was engaged in the most solemn service in St. Paul's (on St. Paul's Day, 1167), an emissary from the Archbishop, who was then in self-imposed exile abroad, came up to the altar, thrust a sentence of excommunication into his hands, and exclaimed aloud, "Know all men that Gilbert, Bishop of London, is excommunicated by Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury." When Becket returned to England, December 1st, 1170, after a hollow reconciliation with the King, he was asked to remove his sentence of excommunication on Foliot and the Bishops of Salisbury and York, who had, as he held, usurped his authority. He refused, unless they made acknowledgment of their errors. The sequel we know. The King's hasty exclamation on hearing of this brought about the Archbishop's murder on the 29th of the same month. During the excommunication, Foliot seems to have behaved wisely and well. He refused to accept it as valid, but stayed away from the cathedral to avoid giving offence to sensitive consciences. After Becket's murder, he declared his innocence of any share in it, and the Bishop of Nevers removed the sentence of excommunication.

It was at this period that the Deanery was occupied by the first man of letters it had yet possessed, Ralph de Diceto. His name is a puzzle; no one has as yet ascertained the place from which it is taken. Very probably he was of foreign birth. When Belmeis was made Bishop of London in 1152, Diceto succeeded him as Archdeacon of Middles.e.x. His learning was great, and his chronicles (which have been edited by Bishop Stubbs) are of great historical value. In the Becket quarrel Diceto was loyal to Foliot, but he also remained friendly with Becket. In 1180, he became Dean of St. Paul's. Here he displayed great and most valuable energy; made a survey of the capitular property (printed by the Camden Society under the editors.h.i.+p of Archdeacon Hale), collected many books, which he presented to the Chapter, built a Deanery House, and established a "fratery," or guild for the ministration to the spiritual and bodily wants of the sick and poor.

He died in 1202. He wrote against the strict views concerning the celibacy of the clergy promulgated by Pope Gregory VII., and declared that the doctrine and the actual practice made a great scandal to the laity. Dean Milman suspects that he was much moved herein by the condition of his own Chapter.

In 1191, whilst King Richard I. was in Palestine, his brother John summoned a council to St. Paul's to denounce William de Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, to whom Richard had entrusted the affairs of government, of high crimes and misdemeanours. The result was that Longchamp had to escape across sea. At length the King returned, but the Londoners were deeply disaffected. William FitzOsbert, popularly known as "Longbeard," poured forth impa.s.sioned harangues from Paul's Cross against the oppression of the poor, and the cathedral was invaded by rioters. Fifty-two thousand persons bound themselves to follow him, but Hubert, Archbishop of Canterbury, met the citizens in the cathedral, and by his mild and persuasive eloquence persuaded them to preserve the peace. FitzOsbert, finding himself deserted, clove the head of the man sent to arrest him, and shut himself up in the church of St. Mary-le-Bow. His followers kept aloof, and a three-days' siege was ended by the church being set on fire. On his attempt to escape he was severely wounded by the son of the man he had killed, was dragged away, and burned alive. But his memory was long cherished by the poor.

Paul's Cross was silent for many years from that time.

In 1213, a great meeting of bishops, abbots, and barons met at St.

Paul's to consider the misgovernment and illegal acts of King John.

Archbishop Langton laid before the a.s.sembly the charter of Henry I., and commented on its provisions. The result was an oath, taken with acclamation, that they would, if necessary, die for their liberties.

And this led up to Magna Charta. But it was a scene as ignominious as the first surrender before Pandulf, when Pope Innocent accepted the homage of King John as the price of supporting him against his barons, and the wretched King, before the altar of St. Paul, ceded his kingdom as a fief of the Holy See. The Archbishop of Canterbury protested both privately and publicly against it.