on the host of fealty to King Henry. Six years later, after the battle of St. Albans, the Yorkists and Lancastrians met again at the altar of St. Paul's in feigned unity. The poor weak monarch was crowned, and had sceptre in hand, and his proud brilliant queen followed him in smiling converse with the Duke of York. Again the city poet broke into rejoicing at the final peace : "At Paul's in London, with great renown, -- knelt before the primate, and swore allegiance to the king; and the duke's two sons, March and Rutland, took the same oath. Within a few. months the battle of Wakefield was fought; Richard was slain, and the duke's head, adorned with a mocking paper crown, was sent, by the she-wolf of a queen, to adorn the walls of York. The next year, however, fortune forsook Henry for ever, and St. Paul's welcomed Edward IV. and the redoubtable "king-maker," who had won the THE CHURCH OF ST. FAITH, THE CRYPT OF OLD ST. PAUL'S, FROM A VIEW BY HOLLAR. The King, the Queen, with lords many an one, In token this love was in heart and thought, Alas for such reconciliations! Four years later more blood had been shed, more battle-fields strewn with dead. The king was a captive, had disinherited his own son, and granted the succession to the Duke of York, whose right a Parliament had acknowledged. His proud queen was in the North rallying the scattered Lancastrians. York and Warwick, Henry's deadly enemies, crown for him at the battle of Mortimer's Cross; and no Lancastrian dared show his face on that triumphant day. Ten years later Warwick, veering to the downfallen king, was slain at Barnet, and the body of the old warrior, and that of his brother, were exposed, barefaced, for three days in St. Paul's, to the delight of all true Yorkists. Those were terrible times, and the generosity of the old chivalry seemed now despised and forgotten. The next month there was even a sadder sight, for the body of King Henry himself was displayed in the Cathedral. Broken-hearted, said the Yorkists; but the Lancastrian belief (favoured by Shakespeare) was that Richard Duke of Gloucester, the wicked Crook back, stabbed him with his own hand in the Tower, and it was said that blood poured from the body when it lay in the Cathedral. Again St. Paul's was profaned at the death of Edward IV., when Richard came to pay his ostentatious orisons in the Cathedral, while he was already planning the removal of the princes to the Tower. Always anxious to please the London citizens, it was to St. Paul's Cross that Richard sent Dr. Shaw to accuse Clarence of illegitimacy. At St. Paul's, too, according to Shakespeare, who in his historic plays often follows traditions now forgotten, or chronicles that have perished, the charges against Hastings mangled; and ill-shaped body thrown, like carrion, across a pack-horse and driven off to Leicester, and Henry VII., the astute, the wily, the thrifty, reigned in his stead. After Henry's victory over Simnel he came two successive days to St. Paul's to offer his thanksgiving, and Simnel, afterwards a scullion in the royal kitchen, rode humbly at his conqueror's side. The last ceremonial of the reign of Henry VII. that took place at St. Paul's was the ill-fated marriage of Prince Arthur-a mere boy, who died six months after-with Katharine of Arragon The whole church was hung with tapestry, and there ST. PAUL'S AFTER THE FALL OF THE SPIRE, FROM A VIEW BY HOLLAR (see page 244). were publicly read. Jane Shore, the mistress, and supposed accomplice of Hastings in bewitching Richard, did penance in St. Paul's. She was the wife of a London goldsmith, and had been mistress of Edward IV. Her beauty, as she walked downcast with shame, is said to have moved every heart to pity. On his accession, King Richard, nervously fingering his dagger, as was his wont to do according to the chronicles, rode to St. Paul's, and was received by procession, amid great congratulation and acclamation from the fickle people. Kemp, who was the Yorkist bishop during all these dreadful times, rebuilt St. Paul's Cross, which then became one of the chief ornaments of London. Richard's crown was presently beaten into a hawthorn bush on Bosworth Field, and his defaced, was a huge scaffold, with seats round it, reaching from the west door to the choir. On this platform the ceremony was performed. All day, at several places in the city, and at the west door of the Cathedral, the conduits ran for the delighted people with red and white wine. The wedded children were lodged in the bishop's palace, and three days later returned by water to Westminster. When Henry VII. died, his body lay in state in St. Paul's, and from thence it was taken to Windsor, to remain there till the beautiful chapel he had endowed at Westminster was ready for his reception. Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's were among the trustees for the endowment he left, and the Cathedral still possesses the royal testament. The A Venetian ambassador who was present has On the opposite side of the altar, on a raised and canopied chair, sat Wolsey; further off stood the legate Campeggio. The twelve bishops and six abbots present all wore their jewelled mitres, while the king himself shone out in a tunic of purple velvet, "powdered" with pearls and rubies, sapphires and diamonds. His collar was studded with carbuncles as large as walnuts. A year later Charles V. was proclaimed emperor by the heralds at St. Paul's. Wolsey gave the benediction, no doubt with full hope of the Pope's tiara. left a graphic description of one of the earliest while high mass was being sung before the rest. ceremonies (1514) which Henry VIII. witnessed at St. Paul's. The Pope, Leo X., had sent the young and chivalrous king a sword and cap of maintenance, as a special mark of honour. The cap was of purple satin, covered with embroidery and pearls, and decked with ermine. The king rode from the bishop's palace to the cathedral on a beautiful black palfrey, the nobility walking before him in pairs. At the high altar the king donned the cap, and was girt with the sword. The procession then made the entire circuit of the church. The king wore a gown of purple satin and gold in chequer, and a jewelled collar; his cap of purple velvet had two jewelled rosettes, and his doublet was of gold brocade. The nobles wore massive chains of gold, and their chequered silk gowns were lined with sables, lynx-fur, and swansdown. In the same reign Richard Fitz-James, the fanatical Bishop of London, persecuted the Lollards, and burned two of the most obstinate at Smithfield. It is indeed, doubtful, even now, if Fitz-James, in his hatred of the reformers, stopped short of murder. In 1514 Richard Hunn, a citizen who had disputed the jurisdiction of the obnoxious Ecclesiastical Court, was thrown into the Lollards' Tower, the bishop's prison, at the south-west corner of the Cathedral. A Wycliffe Bible had been found in his house; he was adjudged a heretic, and one night this obstinate man was found hung in his cell. The clergy called it suicide, but the coroner brought in a verdict of wilful murder against the Bishop's Chancellor, the sumner, and the bell-ringer of the Cathedral. The king, however, pardoned them all on their paying £1,500 to Hunn's family. The bishop, still furious, burned Hunn's body sixteen days after, as that of a heretic, in Smithfield. This fanatical bishop was the ceaseless persecutor of Dean Colet, that excellent and enlightened man, who founded St. Paul's School, and was the untiring friend of Erasmus, whom he accompanied on his memorable visit to Becket's shrine at Canterbury. In 1518 Wolsey, proud and portly, appears upon the scene, coming to St. Paul's to sing mass and celebrate eternal peace between France, England, and Spain, and the betrothal of the beautiful Princess Mary to the Dauphin of France. The large chapel and the choir were hung with gold brocade, blazoned with the king's arms. Near the altar was the king's pew, formed of cloth of gold, and in front of it a small altar covered with silver-gilt images, with a gold cross in the centre. Two low masses were said at this before the king, In 1521, but a little later, Wolsey, "Cardinal of St. Cecilia and Archbishop of York," was welcomed by Dean Pace to St. Paul's. He had come to sit near Paul's Cross, to hear Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, by the Pope's command, denounce "Martinus Eleutherius" and his accursed works, many of which were burned in the churchyard during the sermon, no doubt to the infinite alarm of all heretical booksellers in the neighbouring street. Wolsey had always an eye to the emperor's helping him to the papacy; and when Charles V. came to England to visit Henry, in 1522, Wolsey said mass, assisted by more than twenty obsequious prelates. It was Wolsey who first, as papal legate, removed the Convocation entirely from St. Paul's to Westminster, to be near his house at Whitehall. His ribald enemy, Skelton, then hiding from the cardinal's wrath in the Sanctuary at Westminster, wrote the following rough distich on the arbitrary removal: "Gentle Paul, lay down thy sword, For Peter of Westminster hath shaven thy beard." On the startling news of the battle of Pavia, when Francis I. was taken prisoner by his great rival of Spain, a huge bonfire illumined the west front of St. Paul's, and hogsheads of claret were broached at the Cathedral door, to celebrate the welcome tidings. On the Sunday after, the bluff king, the queen, and both houses of Parliament, attended a solemn "Te Deum" at the cathedral; while on St. Matthew's Day there was a great procession of all the religious orders in London, and Wolsey, with his obsequious bishops, performed service at the high altar. Two years later Wolsey came here again, to lament or rejoice over the sack of Rome by the Constable Bourbon, and the captivity of the Pope. Singularly enough, the fire lighted by Wolsey in St. Paul's Churchyard had failed totally to burn up Luther and all his works; and on Shrove Tuesday, 1527, Wolsey made another attempt to reduce the new-formed Bible to ashes. In the great procession that came on this day to St. Paul's there were six Lutherans in penitential dresses, carrying terribly symbolical fagots and huge lighted tapers. On a platform in the nave sat the portly and proud cardinal, supported by thirty-six zealous bishops, abbots, and priests. At the foot of the great rood over the northern door the heretical tracts and Testaments were thrown into a fire. The prisoners, on their knees, begged pardon of God and the Catholic Church, and were then led three times round the fire, which they fed with the fagots they had carried. Four years later, after Wolsey's fall, the London clergy were summoned to St. Paul's Chapter-house, on the south side. The king, offended at the Church having yielded to Wolsey's claims as a papal legate, by which the penalty of præmunire had been incurred, had demanded from Convocation the alarming fine of £100,000. Immediately six hundred clergy of all ranks thronged riotously to the chapter-house, to resist this outrageous tax. The bishop was all for concession; "their goods and lands were forfeit, their bodies liable to imprisonment." The humble clergy cried out, "We have never meddled in the cardinal's business. Let the bishops and abbots, who have offended, pay." Blows were struck, and eventually fifteen priests and four laymen were condemned to terms of imprisonment in the Fleet and Tower, for their resistance to despotic power. In 1535 nineteen German Anabaptists were examined in St. Paul's, and fourteen of them sent to the stake. Then came plain signs that the Reformation had commenced. The Pope's authority had been denied at Paul's Cross in 1534. A miraculous rood from Kent was brought to St. Paul's, and the machinery that moved the eyes and lips was shown to the populace, after which it was thrown down and broken amid contemptuous laughter. Nor would this chapter be complete if we did not mention a great civic procession at the close of the reign of Henry VIII. On Whit Sunday, 1546, the children of St. Paul's School, with parsons and vicars of every London church, in their copes, went from St. Paul's to St. Peter's, Cornhill, Bishop Bonner bearing the sacrament under a canopy; and at the Cross, before the mayor, aldermen, and all the crafts, heralds proclaimed perpetual peace between England, France, and the Emperor. Two months after, the exbishop of Rochester preached a sermon at Paul's Cross recanting his heresy, four of his late fellowprisoners in Newgate having obstinately perished the child-king a funeral service was celebrated in memory of Francis I., Latin dirges were chanted, and eight mitred bishops sang a requiem to the monarch lately deceased. At his Coronation, while the guilds were marshalled along Cheapside, and tapestries hung from every window, an acrobat descended by a cable from St. Paul's steeple to the anchor of a ship near the Deanery door. In November of the next year, at night, the crucifixes and images in St. Paul's were pulled down and removed, to the horror of the faithful, and all obits and chantreys were confiscated, and the vestments and altar cloths were sold. The early reformers were backed by greedy partisans. The Protector Somerset, who was desirous of building rapidly a sumptuous palace in the Strand, pulled down the chapel and charnel-house in the Pardon churchyard, and carted off the stones of St. Paul's cloister. When the good Ridley was installed Bishop of London, he would not enter the choir until the lights on the altar were extinguished. Very soon a table was substituted for the altar, and there was an attempt made to remove the organ. The altar, and chapel, and tombs, all but John of Gaunt's, were then ruthlessly destroyed. The During the Lady Jane Grey rebellion, Ridley denounced Mary and Elizabeth as bastards. accession of gloomy Queen Mary soon turned the tables. As the Queen passed to her Coronation, a daring Dutchman stood on the cross of St. Paul's waving a long streamer, and shifting from foot to foot as he shook two torches which he held over his head. But the citizens were Protestants at heart. At the first sermon preached at St. Paul's Cross in this reign, Dr. Bourne, an Essex clergyman, prayed for the dead, praised Bonner, and denounced Ridley. The mob, inflamed to madness, shouted, "He preaches damnation! Pull him down! pull him down!" A dagger, thrown at the preacher, stuck quivering in a side-post of the pulpit. With difficulty two good men dragged the rash zealot safely into St. Paul's School. For this riot several persons were sent to the Tower, and a priest and a barber had their ears nailed to the pillory at St. Paul's Cross. The crosses were raised again in St. Paul's, and the old ceremonies and services revived. On St. Katharine's Day, in honour of the queen's mother's patron saint there was a procession with lights and the image of St. Katharine, round St. Paul's steeple, and the bells rang. Not long after this, when a Dr. Pendleton preached the "old doctrines" at St. Paul's Cross, a gun was fired at him. When Bonner was released from the Marshalsea and restored to his see, the people shouted, "Welcome Soon after, at the Cross, Dean Nowell rebuked the home;" and a woman ran forward and kissed Papists for crying out "a judgment." In papal him. We are told that he knelt in prayer on the times the church had also suffered. In Richard I.'s Cathedral steps. reign an earthquake shook down the spire, and in Stephen's time fire had also brought destruction. The Crown and City were roused by this misfortune. Thrifty Elizabeth gave 1,000 marks in gold, and 1,000 marks' worth of timber; the City gave a great benevolence, and the clergy subscribed £1,410. In one month a false roof was erected, and by the end of the year the aisles were leaded in. On the 1st of November, the same year, the mayor, aldermen, and crafts, with eighty torchbearers, went to attend service at St. Paul's. The steeple, however, was never rebuilt, in spite of Queen Elizabeth's angry remonstrances. In 1554, at the reception in St. Paul's of Cardinal Pole, King Philip attended with English, Spanish, and German guards, and a great retinue of nobles. Bishop Gardiner preached on the widening heresy till the audience groaned and wept. Of the cruel persecutions of the Protestants in this reign, St. Paul's was now and then a witness, and likewise of the preparations for the execution of Protestants, which Bonner's party called "trials." Thus we find Master Cardmaker, vicar of St. Bride's, and Warne, an upholsterer in Walbrook, both arraigned at St. Paul's before the bishop for heresy, and carried back from there to Newgate, to be shortly after burned alive in Smithfield. In the midst of these horrors, a strange ceremony took place at St. Paul's, far more worthy, indeed, of the supposed temple of Diana than of a Christian cathedral, did it not remind us that Popery was always strangely intermingled with fragments of old paganism. In June, 1557 (St. Paul's Day, says Machyn, an undertaker and chronicler of Mary's reign), a fat buck was presented to the dean and chapter, according to an annual grant made by Sir Walter le Baud, an Essex knight, in the reign of Edward I. A priest from each London parish attended in his cope, and the Bishop of London wore his mitre, while behind the burly, bullying, persecutor Bonner came a fat buck, his head with his horns borne upon a pole, while forty huntsmen's horns blew a rejoicing chorus. In the first year of Philip and Mary, the Common Council of London passed an act which shows the degradation into which St. Paul's had sunk even before the fire. It forbade the carrying of beercasks, or baskets of bread, fish, flesh, or fruit, or leading mules or horses through the Cathedral, under pain of fines and imprisonment. Elizabeth also issued a proclamation to a similar effect, forbidding a fray, drawing of swords in the church, or shooting with hand-gun or dagg within the church or churchyard, under pain of two months' imprisonment. Neither were agreements to be made for the payment of money within the church. Soon after the fire, a man that had provoked a fray in the church was set in the pillory in the churchyard, and had his ears nailed to a post, and then cut off. These proclamations, however, led to no reform. Cheats, gulls, assassins, and thieves thronged the middle aisle of St. Paul's; advertisements of all kinds covered the walls, the worst class of servants came there to be hired; worthless rascals and disreputable flaunting women met there by appointment. Parasites, hunting for a dinner, hung about a monument of the Beauchamps, foolishly believed At Elizabeth's accession its new mistress soon to be the tomb of the good Duke Humphrey. purged St. Paul's of all its images: copes and Shakespeare makes Falstaff hire red-nosed Bardolph shaven crowns disappeared. The first ceremony of in St. Paul's, and Ben Jonson lays the third act the new reign was the performance of the obsequies of his Every Man in his Humour in the middle of Henry II. of France. An empty hearse was aisle. Bishop Earle, in his "Microcosmography," hung with cloth of gold, the choir draped in black, describes the noise of the crowd of idlers in Paul's the clergy appearing in plain black gowns and caps."as that of bees, a strange hum mixed of walking And now, what the Catholics called a great judgment tongues and feet, a kind of still roar or loud fell on the old Cathedral. During a great storm in whisper." He describes the crowd of young curates, 1561, St. Martin's Church, Ludgate, was struck by "copper" captains, thieves, and dinnerless adlightning; immediately after, the wooden steeple of venturers and gossip-mongers. Bishop Corbet, St. Paul's started into a flame. The fire burned that jolly prelate, speaks of downwards furiously for four hours, the bells were melted, the lead poured in torrents; the roof fell in, and the whole Cathedral became for a time a ruin. The last event of this blood-stained reign was the celebration at St. Paul's of the victory over the French at the battle of St. Quintin by Philip and the Spaniards. A sermon was preached before the city authorities at Paul's Cross, bells were rung, and bonfires blazed in every street. "The walk, Where all our British sinners swear and talk, |