That whether it's a part of earth or sky,
Uncertain seems, and may be thought a proud
Aspiring mountain, or descending cloud;
Paul's, the late name of such a muse whose flight
Has bravely reach'd and soar'd above thy height;
Now shalt thou stand, though sword, or time, or fire,
Or zeal, more fierce than they, thy fall conspire,
Secure, whilst thee the best of poets sings,
Preserv'd from ruin by the best of kings."
"The best of poets" is his brother courtier Waller, who had some time before written his verses "Upon his Majesty's repairing of St. Paul's," in which he compares King Charles, for his regeneration of the Cathedral, to Amphion and other "antique minstrels," who were said to have achieved architectural feats by the power of music, and who, he says,
"Sure were Charles-like kings,
Cities their lutes, and subjects' hearts their strings;
On which with so divine a hand they strook,
Consent of motion from their breath they took."
Jones's first labour, the removal of the various foreign encumbrances that had so long oppressed and deformed the venerable edifice, Waller commemorates by a pair of references to St. Paul's history, not unhappily applied: he says the whole nation had combined with his Majesty
"to grace
The Gentiles' great Apostle, and deface
Those state-obscuring sheds, that like a chain
Seem'd to confine and fetter him again;
Which the glad Saint shakes off at his command,
As once the viper from his sacred hand."
Denham's prediction did no credit to the prophetic reputation of poetry. Of the fabric which was to be unassailable by zeal or fire the poet himself lived to see the ruin, begun by the one and completed by the other; and he himself, curiously enough, a short time before his death, was engaged as the King's surveyor-general in (nominally at least) presiding over the erection of the new Cathedral—the successor of the "sacred pile," of which he had thus sung the immortality.
When Jones began the repairs and additions of which his portico formed a part, in 1633, the rubbish that was removed was carried, Mr. Malcolm informs us, to Clerkenwell fields, where, he suggests, "some curious fragments of antiquity may still remain."[20] The very beauty of this portico, surmounted with its strange pediment and figures, and dragging at its back that heap of deformity, completed the monstrous look of the whole building, like a human countenance backed by some horned lump. But this was nothing to the moral deformities of the interior. Old St. Paul's, throughout almost the whole period of its existence, at least from the reign of Henry the Third, was a thoroughfare, and a "den of thieves." The thoroughfare was occasioned probably by the great circuit which people had been compelled to make by the extent of the wall of the old churchyard—a circumference a great deal larger than it is at present. There is a principle of familiarity in the Catholic worship which, while it excites the devotional tenderness of more refined believers, is apt to produce the consequence, though not the feelings, of contempt among the vulgar. Fear hinders contempt; but when license is mixed with it, and the fear is not in action, the liberties taken are apt to be in proportion. We have seen, in a Catholic chapel in London, a milk-maid come into the passage, dash down her pails, and having crossed herself, and applied the holy water with reverence, depart with the same air with which she came in. The next thing to setting down the pails, under the circumstances above mentioned, would have been to creep with them through the church. Porters and loiterers would follow; and by degrees the place of worship would become a place of lounging and marketing, and intrigue, and all sorts of disorder. In the reign of Edward the Third, the King complains to the Bishop that the "eating-room of the canons" had "become the office and work-place of artisans, and the resort of shameless women." The complaint turned out to be of no avail; nor had the mandate of the Bishop a better result in the time of Richard the Third, though it was accompanied with the penalty of excommunication. An Act was passed to as little purpose in the reign of Philip and Mary; and in the time of Elizabeth the new opinions in religion seem to have left the place fairly in possession of its chaos, as if in derision of the old. The toleration of the abuse thus became a matter of habit and indifference; and a young theologian, afterwards one of the witty prelates of Charles the Second (Bishop Earle), did not scruple to make it the subject of what we should now call a "pleasant article."
"It must appear strange," says a note in Brayley's London and Middlesex (vol. ii. p. 219), "to those who are acquainted with the decent order and propriety of regulation now observed in our cathedral churches, and other places of divine worship, that ever such an extended catalogue of improper customs and disgusting usages as are noticed in various works, should have been formerly admitted to be practised in St. Paul's church, and more especially that they should have been so long habitually exercised as to be defended on the plea of prescription.
"These nuisances had become so great, that in the time of Philip and Mary the Common Council found it necessary to pass an act, subjecting all future offenders to pains and penalties. From that act, the church seems to have been not only made a common passage-way for all—beer, bread, fish, flesh, fardels of stuffs, &c., but also for mules, horses, and other beasts. This statute, however, must have proved only a temporary restraint (excepting, probably, as to the leading of animals through the church); for in the reign of Elizabeth, we learn from Londinium Redivivum (vol. iii. p. 71), that idlers and drunkards were indulged in lying and sleeping on the benches at the choir door; and that other usages, too nauseous for description, were also frequent."
Among the curious notices relating to the irreverent practices pursued in this church in the time of Elizabeth, collected by Mr. Malcolm from the manuscript presentments on visitations preserved at St. Paul's, are the following:—
"In the upper quier wher the comon [communion] table dothe stande, there is much unreverente people, walking with their hatts on their heddes, comonly all the service tyme, no man reproving them for yt."
"Yt is a greate disorder in the churche, that porters, butchers, and water-bearers, and who not, be suffered (in special tyme of service) to carrye and recarrye whatsoever, no man withstandinge them, or gainsaying them," &c.
"The notices of encroachments on St. Paul's, in the same reign, are equally curious. The chantry and other chapels were completely diverted from their ancient purposes; some were used as receptacles for stores and lumber; another was a school, another a glazier's shop; and the windows of all were, in general, broken. Part of the vaults beneath the church was occupied by a carpenter, the remainder was held by the bishop, the dean and chapter, and the minor canons. One vault, thought to have been used for a burial-place, was converted into a wine-cellar, and a way had been cut into it through the wall of the building itself. (This practice of converting church vaults into wine-cellars, it may be remarked, is not yet worn out. Some of the vaults of Winchester Cathedral are now, or were lately, used for that purpose.) The shrowds and cloisters under the convocation house, 'where not long since the sermons in foul weather were wont to be preached,' were made 'a common lay-stall for boardes, trunks, and chests, being lett oute unto trunk-makers, where, by meanes of their daily knocking and noyse, the church is greatly disturbed.' More than twenty houses also had been built against the outer walls of the cathedral; and part of the very foundations was cut away to make offices. One of those houses had literally a closet dug in the wall; from another was a way through a window into a wareroom in the steeple; a third, partly formed by St. Paul's, was lately used as a play-house; and the owner of the fourth baked his bread and pies in an oven excavated within a buttress."[21]
The middle of St. Paul's was also the Bond Street of that period, and remained so till the time of the Commonwealth. The loungers were called Paul's Walkers.
"The young gallants from the inns of court, the western and the northern parts