THE STORY OF THE CHARTER HOUSE

In 1347 Edward III. was besieging Calais; he was at war with France, and but the year before had won the great victory of Crecy. The siege lasted a whole year, and then at last the men of Calais could hold out no longer, for the French King could not help them and they had no food left. When King Edward heard this he sent to them one of his knights, Sir Walter Manny, with this message, “Give yourselves up to me that I may do with you what I will.” This was a hard thing to ask, so hard that Edward’s lords pleaded with him to show mercy; and the King gave way and said he would be content if six citizens came to him, barefoot, in their shirts, with ropes about their necks, and bearing the city’s keys. “On them,” he said, “I will do my will.” So the Captain of Calais gave up six of the citizens to Sir Walter Manny, and he brought them to the King and begged him to spare their lives begged, but begged in vain. Then Queen Philippa, Edward’s wife, weeping bitterly, fell on her knees, and prayed the King for love of our Lord to have mercy; and the King’s heart was moved to pity, and he answered her, “Though I do it against my will take them! I give them to you.” Can you not fancy how well she treated them, and how happy she was when she sent them home to Calais?

In those days, outside the walls of London towards the north-west was a pleasant land of fields and trees, of streams and clear sweet springs, a lonely land with few houses except three great monasteries. Here Sir Walter Manny and the Bishop of London of that time founded another monastery for twenty-four monks and a Prior or chief monk. It was called the London Charter House, for it was one of several Charter Houses which all belonged to the same kind of monks, who all obeyed the same rules and wore the same dress, and so they are said to belong to the same Order. This new Charter House stood on land which had been given (some by Sir Walter Manny, some by a former Bishop of London,) to be used as a burial-ground for people who had died in the great sickness, called the Black Death, in the year 1349.

Let us fancy what the life of the monks of the Charter House was like. Their day began at an hour when you are sound asleep in bed; at eleven o’clock the convent bell rang, and at midnight the monks met in chapel for Matins, their first service, which often lasted two hours, or even longer, so slowly, so solemnly, did they chant the psalms and prayers. When it was over the monks went back to their beds until five o’clock, when they rose and went about the business of the day. What did they find to do? They were busy all day long, for they had to take part in the many services of the chapel; and each monk had his own little house and garden, called his “cell,” where he passed most of his time alone. Here he read and prayed; here he worked, perhaps at carpentering or some such trade, perhaps he copied or wrote books; here he ate his solitary meal, the only meal of the day, which might be of eggs, fish, fruit and vegetables, but never of meat; sometimes it was of bread and water only. By seven o’clock his day was ended and he was asleep in bed. One of the strictest rules of this Order of monks is that they shall be silent except in Chapel. They only meet together twice a week; once when they all dine together, and again on Sundays, when they all go for a long walk in company.

This has been the life of every Carthusian monk (so the Charter House monks are called,) ever since the Order was founded in the eleventh century; and this was the life of the London Charter House from the days of Edward III. until the reign of Henry VIII. Do you remember that he and his Parliament broke the links which bound together the Churches of Rome and England? In 1534 a law was made which said that the King, not the Pope, should henceforth be the Head of the English Church, and that anyone who would not agree to this was a traitor. Some people in England were very glad of this, for there were things in the Church which seemed to them altogether wrong; “Now,” they thought, “these wrong things can be set right.” But other people were very sorry; they believed the Pope was indeed Head of the whole Church, that God had made him so, and what God had willed man cannot alter. Amongst those who thought so were the monks of the Charter House.

It is hard to wait day by day for some dreadful thing which we know is surely coming to us, so these were sad days for the monks. Were they frightened, I wonder, when they heard what was going on in the world outside their walls, and knew that soon, very soon, they must tell the fierce King that for them the Pope was and must always be Head of the Church? What would happen to them? Did their prayers and solemn services strengthen and comfort them then? Yes, indeed they did. And their Prior, John Houghton, was a brave true man, as men have need to be in such times; and not only by his words, but by his deeds, he taught his monks to choose rather to die than to give up what they believed to be true; for in the spring of the next year he and two other Carthusian Priors told Thomas Cromwell, the King’s great Minister, that they could not change their Faith. They were sent to the Tower, tried as traitors in Westminster Hall, and found guilty. Turn to picture 6; here you see Sir Thomas More, in this month of May himself a prisoner in the Tower for the same reason, watching the three Priors and another monk going away to die. As he watched, More said to his daughter, “Lo, dost thou see, Meg, that these blessed fathers be now as cheerful going to their deaths as bridegrooms to their marriages?”

At Tyburn Tree, where the Marble Arch now stands, John Houghton laid down his life for his Faith.

Two sad years followed; then all but ten of the monks yielded to the King and promised to “forsake the Bishop of Rome.” These ten were sent to Newgate Prison. There they would very soon have died, for in those days life in a prison was a dreadful thing, but they were helped by a brave woman, called Margaret Clement, whom Sir Thomas More had brought up with his own daughter Margaret. “Moved with a great compassion of those holy Fathers, she dealt with the gaoler ... and withal did win him with money that he was content to let her come into the prison to them, which she did, attiring and disguising herself as a milkmaid, with a great pail upon her head full of meat, wherewith she fed that blessed company, putting meat into their mouths, they being tied and not able to stir, nor to help themselves.”

Soon orders came that the monks were to be kept very strictly, and the gaoler could not allow Margaret Clement to visit them; then, one after another, all but one died.

In 1538 the rest of the monks were turned out of the Charter House. Sorrowfully they passed out under its great archway, and went their different ways to places of safety.

And was the Charter House left empty to fall into ruins? No; it became the property of first one great lord and then of another. They altered it to meet their needs; the monks’ cells disappeared; it became a grand mansion. Queen Elizabeth and James I. both stayed there.

At last it was sold to Thomas Sutton, a merchant who had made a large fortune by mining for coal near Newcastle and selling it in London. He must have been a good old man, for we are told he used often to go into his quiet garden to pray, “Lord, Thou hast given me a large and liberal estate; give me also a heart to make use thereof.”

He had no children, and when he died, in 1611, he left his great wealth to found a free school, and a “hospital” where eighty old men “soldiers who had borne arms by land or sea, merchants who had been ruined by shipwreck or piracy, and servants of the King or Queen,” could spend their last days in peace. They are called the Charter House Pensioners. Turn back to picture 7; these two old men are Pensioners. At first there were to be but forty boys in the school, but the numbers grew larger and larger; and many a great man has been educated in the famous Charter House School.

As the years passed on and London spread beyond its walls, the pleasant fields about the Charter House were covered with streets and houses. At last, about fifty years ago, the Governors of the school thought it would be wise to move it to a more open place; so they built a new school at Godalming in Surrey, and the boys moved into it in 1872. Into the old buildings they had left came a great day-school, the Merchant Taylors’, so there are still about 500 boys as well as the old pensioners in the London Charter House.

What a strange history the Charter House has! What changes it has seen! The convent with its silent monks, the great house with its state and royal visitors, the noisy school, the peaceful home of the old pensioners, the Charter House bears traces of them all. For here are still the courts and cloisters and the chapel of the monks, and the stateroom of the great noble; the boys’ playground (picture 2 shows us a little bit of it,) is the square round which once stood the monks’ quiet cells; in the chapel we may see the tomb of the Founder, Sir Thomas Sutton; indeed, both the Founders, Sir Thomas Sutton and Sir Walter Manny, lie buried there.