“What are we going to see this morning?” Betty asked on the following Saturday.
“We’re not going to see anything till I know whether you remember at least the names of the kings between Richard the Second and Queen Elizabeth,” returned Godmother firmly.
“Oh, then, it’s to Queen Elizabeth’s time we’re going presently?” Betty exclaimed. “I shall like that. I really do know the kings after Richard the Second, Godmother. So I’ll make haste about them. Henry the Fourth came next, and he was a usurper. Then Henry the Fifth. After him, Henry the Sixth (when the Wars of the Roses began), then Edward the Fourth, next Edward the Fifth, the poor little murdered-in-the-Tower king. After him, Richard the Third, his cruel uncle. Then Henry the Seventh, Henry the Eighth, Edward the Sixth (who died young), and then his sister Mary, and then his other sister Elizabeth.”
“Well done!” said Godmother, laughing, as Betty rattled off the names. “Well, the reigns of all those sovereigns took up about a hundred and sixty years. So when we magically see London again, it will be a hundred and sixty years older than it was at our last visit.”
“Oh, can’t we go back at once?” Betty urged impatiently.
“Not quite at once. The car is here, and I’m going to take you to the Royal Exchange.”
Much as she loved the magic part of these Saturdays, Betty also enjoyed the drives through modern London, especially as she knew the magic would come later. So she gladly followed Godmother into the waiting car.
“The Royal Exchange?” she began, almost before they were seated. “I’ve been past it often. It’s that big place near the Bank and the Mansion House. But I don’t know what it’s for.”
“It’s the great centre for English trade affairs. There, everything that has to do with England’s commerce is discussed by the merchants who meet to talk and arrange their business.”
In a very short time they reached that busy part of the City where, close together, stand the Bank of England, the Mansion House, and the Royal Exchange. But before the car drew up, Godmother had called Betty’s attention to the names of two streets close by, and also, a moment later, to a curious sign hanging from a house. The first street was called Gresham Street, and the sign not far from it was a large gilded grasshopper over a door in Lombard Street.
“I want you to remember these,” she said. “Now we’ll go into the courtyard of the Exchange and look at the pictures.”
Betty followed her up a flight of steps in front of the great building, and found that the walls of a corridor running on all four sides of the courtyard within the entrance, had large pictures painted upon them. She soon discovered that much of the history not only of London, but of England, was shown by these pictures.
Before two or three of them she lingered with special interest.
“Oh, Godmother, look! Here’s the market-place of London in Roman times. The market-place we saw.” And again, as another scene with which she had memories caught her eye, “Godmother, there’s dear old Dick Whittington giving alms to the people. He was dressed just like that when we saw him last Saturday, and so were the boys and girls in the Chepe!”
She would like to have stayed much longer before the painted scenes (some of them represented things that had happened only a year or two ago, such, for instance, as the fight at Zeebrugge, and the Thanksgiving Service after the War)—but Godmother hurried her away.
“We’ll come again when we’ve seen a little more of London in the Past,” she said. “I want you now, only just to remember that you’ve seen the Royal Exchange of to-day.”
They drove back through Cheapside, Fleet Street and the Strand into Whitehall, where Betty looked up at that statue of King Charles the First on horseback, which stands with its back to Trafalgar Square.
“As we shall be in London of Queen Elizabeth’s time this afternoon,” said Godmother, “it may be useful to notice all that we are passing now. Where you see that statue of Charles the First, there stood in Elizabeth’s day, one of the crosses to the memory of Queen Eleanor. Remember that, for one thing. We’re passing the Horse Guards, with the soldiers on horseback outside. Remember exactly where the gateway stands. Now look at this line of houses and buildings on the left—Scotland Yard among them. Imagine them all swept away, what would you see?”
“The river,” replied Betty. “The Victoria Embankment first, and then the river.”
“Yes. Well, keep this picture of the present Whitehall in your head, because you will look upon a very different one this afternoon.”
Betty smiled in anticipation of “the magic time” that was coming. “I do wonder what London will be like in Queen Elizabeth’s day!” she exclaimed. “Do you think we shall see her? And Shakespeare too, perhaps?”
“Possibly,” said Godmother. “Here we are at home, and if you like, you may amuse yourself by looking at an old map I’ve got upstairs, made towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth. You will see that though London has grown bigger since the days of Dick Whittington, it is still full of open spaces and large gardens, even within the walls. And outside them, where now we have miles and miles of streets, it was still nearly all open country, except on the south side of the river, where you will see some interesting buildings marked.”
Betty was interested in the quaint old map, but it was one thing to look at a map, and quite another to walk in the actual streets it represented, and she longed for the afternoon.
“How shall we get back to-day?” she asked when the time came.
“There are many ways of getting into the Past,” Godmother replied. “Sometimes a single word, or the sight of a picture, or a line of poetry is the magic that will send one there in the twinkling of an eye. To-day we will try one line from a poem written by a man called William Dunbar. No one has ever praised London better than this poet, who saw the city in the sixteenth century, though about fifty years before Elizabeth came to the throne. Shut your eyes, take this book in your hand, and say after me the line with which each verse of Dunbar’s poem ends:
“London, thou art the flower of Cities all,” repeated Betty obediently....
“Now you may look!” said Godmother after a pause and as Betty’s eyes flew open, she added, “We are in the middle of the sixteenth century. Elizabeth is Queen, and here we are once more on London Bridge.”
They were standing by the tower at the entrance gate, looking towards the tower at the other end, leading into Southwark, but Betty did not at first recognize it as the same bridge on which she had stood in the Middle Ages.
“Why, it looks more like a street than a bridge,” she cried. And indeed when they began to walk across it, she and Godmother were in a street. Gabled houses lined the parapets on either hand, shutting out any view of the river, and at the foot of all the houses, were shops. Half-way across the bridge stood a fantastic-looking house which Godmother said was called Nonsuch,—a perfectly delightful name, Betty decided. Then came an open space from which one could look up and down the river before the houses and shops closed in again and extended right up to the gate and towers at the Southwark end of the bridge.
“Oh, how it’s altered!” cried Betty. “But the little Chapel of St. Thomas is there still, and it’s the same bridge, of course, only built over with all these funny old houses. And how the dress of the people has altered too,” she went on. “Look at this lady coming with the enormous ruff round her neck.”
“But they’re still very gay, aren’t they?” remarked Godmother. “Here’s a fine young man approaching, with his long crimson silk stockings and his slashed doublet, and the little red velvet cloak hanging from one shoulder. You see the men are quite as gaily dressed as the women. Just as they were in the fourteenth century. Only now the costume both for men and women has changed.”
“London’s grown bigger since we last saw it,” said Betty, looking right and left up and down the river from the open space where she stood.
“It’s had nearly two hundred years to do it in. But though the buildings cluster more thickly, the old wall, as you notice, still remains, and people enter or leave London through its gates. There’s one of them, you see. It’s called Aldgate, which means Old Gate, because it was one of the first to be built.”
“Is that where Aldgate Street is now?”
“Yes. Beyond it, as you know, in our day, London stretches on and on, northwards and eastwards. But though there are buildings outside the gates, as you may see, they are set in green fields, and there is still country just beyond the gates of London. Now let us wander about a little to discover what changes there are since the last time we were in the Past. Let us see how much of the old has gone, and what there is that’s new.”
They began their walk along the river bank, and very soon Betty saw here and there, great spaces in which sometimes a wall, sometimes a column was left standing. Otherwise, except for a litter of stones, nothing remained of the buildings but ruins.
“What have they been doing here, Godmother?” she asked in surprise.
“Pulling down monasteries, colleges for priests, and hospitals that were looked after by monks and nuns.”
“But why?”
“Now you’ll have to think of your history. About fifty years ago, counting that we are now in the year 1590, Elizabeth’s father, Henry the Eighth, was reigning. Remember his quarrel with the Pope. Remember how he made his subjects become Protestants. The monasteries were the homes of the monks, so they were swept away because they represented the old Roman Catholic faith. When Elizabeth came to the throne, London was as full of ruins as it had formerly been full of monasteries. Now, as we shall see, new buildings are everywhere rising on the sites of the old religious houses. But as yet there hasn’t been time to build over all of them. This, for instance,” she pointed to the crumbling walls and broken pillars at which Betty was sadly gazing, “is still nothing but a heap of ruins.”
“What was it?”
“A college for priests, called the College of St. Spirit, built by our old friend Dick Whittington.”
“Oh, what a shame!” cried Betty. “It’s dreadful to come back to London and find so many beautiful places gone or spoilt, Godmother.”
“Yes, it’s sad, I agree. Though it’s true that the power of the Church had grown too great, and most of the clergy had become rich and idle, it seems unnecessary to destroy the beauty of churches and monasteries because the people to whom they belonged were unworthy. However, nothing can remain as it was for ever, you know, and though we shall find much that was beautiful in the fourteenth century vanished for ever, we shall also see new beautiful things that have sprung, or are springing into life in this, the sixteenth century. Let us go and look at some of them. We’ll go first to the Royal Exchange.”
“Why, we’ve just been there!”
“Not to the one we’re going to see, though it stands in exactly the same place. We’ll walk to it through the Chepe.”
“It was called Cheapside this morning when we drove down it,” said Betty, smiling. “How funny it is to think it should be really the same place.”
“More or less on the same ground, at any rate,” Godmother returned. “Here we are.”
“It isn’t so very much altered from the time we saw it when Richard the Second was king, is it?” Betty remarked, looking round. “Though some of the houses are larger and grander,” she added.
“You see many of them are built of brick and stone now. How handsome they are! This sixteenth century is the age for beautifully-built dwelling-houses. We shall see many of them along the Strand presently, and scattered about all over the City as well.”
“There’s Queen Eleanor’s cross, and there are the fountains and the booths and the funny shops, just as they were,” Betty observed.
“The same crowds, the same noise, the same bustle!” Godmother agreed. “The costume of the people is different, that’s all. They look very well off and happy, don’t they? England has become richer and much more prosperous lately. There are signs of it everywhere as you will not be long in discovering.”
“But there are lots of the old houses left,” Betty said.
They had turned out of the Chepe, and were walking down a narrow lane bordered on either side by the timber houses she remembered from her last visit to old-time London,—houses whose top stories so nearly met, that only a narrow strip of sky was visible between them.
“Yes, and they will last till the Great Fire sweeps them all away in less than a hundred years’ time. Now here we are at the Royal Exchange.”
They were out of the narrow lane now, and there, rising in front of them, was a fine, foreign-looking building of brick and stone with a high sloping roof, and pinnacles at the corners, upon each one of which was placed a huge metal grasshopper.
“Do you remember the name of the street I pointed out to you near this spot this morning?” asked Godmother.
“Yes. Gresham Street. And we saw a big gilt grasshopper, something like those up there, hanging out from a doorway, in another street close by,” Betty answered.
“Well, Gresham Street is named after the man who built that Exchange,—Sir Thomas Gresham. And the grasshopper in Lombard Street is the Gresham crest. London in this reign of Elizabeth has become very rich and prosperous. Well, its riches and its prosperity have been so greatly increased by Sir Thomas Gresham, that I must tell you something about him. He is a great merchant who in this year, 1590, has a goldsmith’s shop in Lombard Street at the sign of the Grasshopper. For though he has been knighted, and now has a great house in Bishopsgate Street, he still keeps his shop. When he was a younger man, he went to Antwerp, where there was a fine building for the use of the merchants in that city. Now in London, there was no convenient place for the use of merchants who wanted to discuss business, so on his return, Thomas Gresham built that Exchange you see before you, and made it as much as possible like the Exchange he had seen in Antwerp. That, you see, accounts for its foreign appearance. He then presented the mansion to the City of London, and invited Queen Elizabeth to open it, and it was she who called it The Royal Exchange—(a name our present Exchange still keeps). Well, at the time at which we’ve arrived now, it has been open about twenty years, and has been so useful for commerce, that the trade of London has enormously increased. There are, of course, other reasons for the present wealth of the City, some of which we shall find out later. But that Royal Exchange has greatly helped its prosperity.”
“It’s quite different from the one we have now,” said Betty, “and it looks as though it ought to last for ages. Why isn’t it standing in our day?”
“Because it was burnt down in the Great Fire, like so many other beautiful and interesting things. Then another one was built, and that also was burnt. So there have been two Royal Exchanges on the same spot as that on which the third—our present one—stands.”
“Sir Thomas Gresham, in this reign, is rather like what Dick Whittington was in the reign of Richard the Second, I suppose?” Betty remarked. “Dick Whittington was a great merchant too, who did a lot of good for London.”
“Yes, London has been very fortunate in having generous merchants.”
“Now let us go back to London Bridge, and see if we can find other reasons besides the Exchange for the increase of wealth and luxury in this city.”
As Betty followed her, she looked back at Sir Thomas Gresham’s quaint building with its sloping roof, its high middle tower, and the gilded grasshoppers on its pinnacles. It was a very different place indeed from the one she had visited this very morning with all the roar and bustle of modern London round about it, but its purpose was the same. For now, as then, the Royal Exchange is the centre of London’s enormous trade.
When they reached the river again, Betty noticed at once how much more crowded the shipping had become than it was in the fourteenth century.
On the side of the bridge towards the Tower, the broad sheet of water was filled with ships of a shape and build strange to her eyes, but picturesque and delightful in appearance. They were small, and had enormously high prows, coloured and gilded, and were hung with many gay flags and streamers.
“Some of those ships have sailed across the Atlantic to the strange newly-discovered country of America,” said Godmother. “Let us go down on to the quay, where you see the crowd of little boys round that sunburnt sailor. He is telling them all sorts of travellers’ tales, you may be sure.”
Betty ran eagerly down a slimy wooden staircase on to the quay that was thronged with sailors unloading some ships that had newly arrived. A rough, strong-looking man with a face burnt almost black by the sun, and large gold rings hanging from his ears, was talking to a group of men and boys who listened breathlessly to stories about gold and jewels, about marvellous animals and still more marvellous men, about wonderful islands under hot blue skies, all of which the sailor had seen in his travels.
Glancing at his audience, Betty saw by their faces how his words stirred their imagination and filled them with excitement.
“Such stories of foreign travel are being told in every inn by sailors who have come back from new lands,” said Godmother. “All through the present reign of Elizabeth, great English sailors like Drake and Hawkins, of whom you’ve heard, have been making voyages, and coming back to London with gold and all sorts of merchandise.”
“That’s one of the reasons why London is getting so rich, then?” Betty asked.
“One of the chief reasons. England has already beaten the Spanish Armada and become ‘Mistress of the Seas,’ and the ships you see here, go to and from this port of London increasing its trade and its riches every day. Now you understand why that Exchange built by Sir Thomas Gresham was so much needed as a meeting-place for merchants to arrange the enormous amount of business the sailors have won for them. London is becoming more and more a city of merchants, living in beautiful houses. We will go and look at one of them. It is called Crosby Place, and it’s not far from the Royal Exchange which we have just seen.”
“Crosby?” echoed Betty. “But I thought it was somewhere in Chelsea? There’s a Crosby Hall there. I passed it only the other day!”
“I’ll explain that to you in a minute, when we’ve seen where the house stands now, where it was built, and where it ought to have remained—in Bishopsgate Street.”
Before very long they had reached a most beautiful and stately mansion. It was of immense size, with windows wonderfully sculptured in stone-work. It had a long noble hall and splendid gateways and outside staircases leading to doors entering the building at different levels. A big garden surrounded it.
“Oh, what a lovely place!” exclaimed Betty.
“It has such a wonderful history,” Godmother said, “that I must tell you at least some of it.”
“It was built by a merchant, a rich grocer called Sir John Crosby, in the reign of Edward IV, so already in this reign of Elizabeth it’s a hundred years old.”
“Who lives in it now?” asked Betty.
She was watching with interest the men and women moving about the courtyard in the costume of Elizabeth’s time, the men with slashed sleeves to their bright-coloured doublets, and the women in brocade skirts, with big ruffs standing up at the back of the neck.
“The Mayor of London, a merchant called Sir John Spencer, owns Crosby Place now. You see what splendid homes the merchants of this reign possess! The nobles are leaving London and selling their palaces to the rich traders. But before Sir John Spencer bought it, many famous people from time to time had lived at Crosby Place. One of them was Richard the Third before he became king, and it was in that great hall that he heard the news of the murder of his little nephews in the Tower. Another celebrated man who lived here for a time, was Sir Thomas More, and here, as it is thought, he wrote his most famous book.”
“You mean Utopia, don’t you?” Betty asked. “We had a lesson about it in school yesterday!”
“Yes, I’m glad you have heard of it. After he had been here some years, Sir Thomas More sold Crosby Place to a great friend of his, an Italian merchant, who, after the execution of his friend, let the mansion to the husband of Margaret Roper—More’s daughter.”
“Poor Margaret Roper!” exclaimed Betty. “I expect she was glad to come back to the house her father had lived in, don’t you, Godmother? But she’s dead now, I suppose—in this reign of Elizabeth, I mean?”
“Yes. Crosby Place belongs now to the Mayor of London, as I’ve already said, and before long, his daughter, a very extravagant lady, married to Lord Northampton, will come to live here. I’ll show you (when we slip back into our own day) an amusing letter from her to her husband in which she explains how she must have all her houses furnished. She was so rich that this Crosby Place was only one of them. But no doubt she filled it with all the things she mentions in her letter, ‘cushions, carpets, silver warming-pans, fair hangings,’ and so forth.
“Another woman of a very different sort will also come to live here very shortly. I mean Sir Philip Sidney’s fascinating sister, the Countess of Pembroke, of whom you will read if you don’t know anything about her already.”
“I do know a little. Sir Philip Sidney wrote the Arcadia for her, didn’t he? It does seem strange to think I’m in Queen Elizabeth’s reign and that some of these famous people must be alive,” said Betty. “But, Godmother, you haven’t told me how the Hall of this beautiful house comes to be at Chelsea now?”
“I must finish its story quickly. A good many years ahead this splendid Crosby Place will be partly burnt down, though its Great Hall will escape. It will fall partly into ruins and actually be used as a warehouse! Then almost in my day it will be restored, and finally become a restaurant. I remember having lunch there not so many years ago. But at last, not long before you were born, Betty, the Hall,—all that remained of this Crosby Place you are magically seeing now,—was pulled down to make room for modern buildings. But because it was so celebrated, and held so many memories of famous people, it was taken down carefully, and as well as possible put together again and built up on Chelsea Embankment.”
“It’s not a bit the same thing as having it here, where it belongs, though,” Betty objected. “It’s dreadful, I think.”
“I quite agree with you. It ought to have remained here in Bishopsgate Street. But let us enjoy our magic sight of it while we can, before we have to return to our own century.”
______________________________
Just at the moment, Betty turned round quickly to look after a boy who passed, wearing a long dark blue coat, with a red leather belt round the waist, yellow stockings and a little white tab or cravat at his neck.
“Why, there’s a Blue Coat boy!” she exclaimed. “Whatever is he doing in London in the reign of Elizabeth?”
“He might better ask you that question,” returned Godmother, laughing, “for he belongs to this age, and you don’t. But he reminds me that we ought to go and look at some of the great schools, and as you’re interested in that boy, we’ll see his school first.”
A short walk brought them in sight of a stately pile of buildings.
“If we were back in our own century,” said Godmother, “this spot on which we are standing, would be Newgate Street. Remember that, and now think of London as we saw it in the reign of Richard the Second. Do you remember the Grey Friars?”
“Yes, the monks in grey robes, with bare feet? There were hundreds of them about.”
“Well, that’s their splendid church and monastery, though the monks themselves are no longer there.”
“Henry the Eighth turned them out, I suppose?” asked Betty.
“Yes, he turned them out, and gave their dwelling to the City of London. Then his son, the young Protestant King Edward VI, came to the throne. Now only a few days before he died, Edward listened to a very touching sermon from one of the new Protestant bishops, about the need for looking after poor children who were fatherless. He was so impressed, that he set apart this Grey Friars’ monastery to be a school for orphan boys for ever, and called it Christ’s Hospital.”
“And it’s still a school for them, isn’t it?” Betty exclaimed eagerly. “Why, my cousin Dick goes to it. But it’s not in London now. Dick goes to school somewhere in the country.”
“It’s only about twenty years ago that Christ’s Hospital, or, as we generally call it now, the Blue Coat School, was moved to Horsham in Sussex. Up to that time it stood here. At first, as you see, the boys were lodged and taught in the monastery that once belonged to the Grey Friars. Long years afterwards, the monastery part was pulled down and new houses built. But the school still stood on the old ground, and forty years ago, boys played over the place where hundreds of Grey Friars were buried. Now they play in green fields in the country, and live in red-brick newly-built houses, and have a new red-brick chapel instead of this ancient church.”
“Isn’t there any of it left in our time?” asked Betty.
Godmother shook her head. “Another and quite a different church stands on its site, and instead of the old Courts of Christ’s Hospital, you will see when you come to this place in our day, a huge modern building—the London Post Office.”
Betty sighed. “What a pity! But even though the school is moved, I’m glad the boys still wear the same dress as they did in Edward the Sixth’s time. That makes even the new school still interesting, doesn’t it?”
“There go some of them,” said Godmother, pointing to where in the distance two or three yellow-stockinged boys were running across a courtyard surrounded by walls that even in the reign of Elizabeth were ancient. “I saw their descendants playing football when I passed near Horsham in the train the other day. And from the look of them, they might have been the very same lads.”
“That is what’s so interesting about London,” Betty remarked. “Though it’s so changed now—in the time to which we belong, I mean—things that belong to the Past go on. In a different way, of course. But there’s always something about them to show what they had to do with the Past, isn’t there?”
“Yes, if it’s only the name of a street,” Godmother agreed. “Nearly every name in London is a magic key unlocking a door into some part or other of the Past. I’m glad you’re beginning to find London not quite so dull,” she added in a teasing voice.
“It’s simply wonderful—when you see it by magic,” Betty returned.
“Every one can see it by magic if they take a little trouble,” was Godmother’s reply.
“Are there any more big schools we can see?” Betty asked, as they turned away from the great monastery that once held the Grey Friars, and was now peopled by boys.
“Several. The century we are in, the sixteenth, is the great time for the starting of schools, many of which, like Christ’s Hospital, are great schools to this day. For instance, close to St. Paul’s, whose spire you can see from here, is the famous school of St. Paul’s, begun, or founded, as we say, by Dean Colet, when Elizabeth’s father, Henry the Eighth, was reigning. It’s been more than fifty years in existence already.”
“And now it’s at Hammersmith. Why, my brother Harry goes there!”
“So that makes it about four hundred years old in our day, doesn’t it?” said Godmother. “But it’s still the same school. Then over there, is Charter House, where the boys are lodged in a monastery once belonging to certain monks called the Carthusians. They remained there till my day. But now, like the Blue Coat boys, they have moved into the country—to Godalming. They still call themselves Carthusians, though, in memory of the old monastery from which they came. We’ll go and see all that is left of Charter House when we slip back into our own age. It’s still very interesting and beautif
