Читать книгу Martyrs and Mystics - Ed Glinert - Страница 12

The ancient heart of London, just one square mile in size, is the setting for the country’s main cathedral, St Paul’s. During the 1666 Fire of London eighty-six churches were destroyed here. Although over the subsequent centuries the City’s population has withered away the area still has the greatest concentration of religious buildings in England – thirty-nine churches and one synagogue, Bevis Marks, Britain’s oldest. In 1847 Lionel de Rothschild was elected MP for the City of London but was unable to take his seat as new MPs were required to take the Christian oath, something which as a Jew he refused to do. A compromise wasn’t reached until 1858.

ALDERSGATE, Aldersgate Street at Gresham Street

Aldersgate was one of twelve traditional gates of the City of London (along with Aldgate, Moorgate, Newgate and others). Each represented one of the tribes of Israel, as medieval leaders thought this would give the city divine legitimacy. In 1603 when James VI of Scotland journeyed to London for the first time to take the throne as James I of England he entered through Aldersgate. The king later had the structure rebuilt with statues of Old Testament prophets Samuel and Jeremiah, and accompanying biblical texts. These told his subjects he was God’s anointed monarch, a direct descendant of King David, and that the British were the chosen people, descendants of the lost tribes of Israel and now holders of Christianity’s mantle, who at the Lord’s second appearance would gather together as one family from whom ‘the elect’ would be chosen.

→ Creation of the King James Bible, p. 59

Sacred City

As with many ancient cities, London’s early town planners were guided by the ‘sacred’ measurements of the Bible, which supposedly give cities divine protection. They are based on the Old Testament unit of the cubit, the length from the tip of the fingers to the elbow, set, inevitably, by the individual in charge of the measuring and thus differing from person to person.

The key ‘sacred’ lengths are 1,600 cubits, as used in building Solomon’s Temple, and 2,000 cubits. The latter distance features prominently in the Old Testament Book of Numbers, chapter 35 which instructs builders: ‘Ye shall measure from without the city on the east side two thousand cubits, and on the south side two thousand cubits, and on the west side two thousand cubits, and on the north side two thousand cubits, and the city shall be in the midst.’

This measurement has special significance. In Hebrew 1,000 is denoted by the letter aleph (). Two thousand is therefore two alephs, and these letters spliced together form the Star of David, the great icon of Jewish lore. Two thousand cubits is the distance from Jerusalem to the Mount of Olives. In the City of London the distance from Temple Bar, the historic boundary between the cities of London and Westminster to St Paul’s is 2,000 cubits. Similarly, the ancient church of St Dunstan-in-the-East stands 2,000 cubits from St Paul’s as the City’s eastern boundary.

Those in charge of rebuilding London after the 1666 Fire – Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, Nicholas Hawksmoor and his team – were in thrall to the idea of sacred geometry. Although they were scientists and men of reason, their agenda was rich with religious arcana. They were influenced by the notion that Christianity had arrived in England as early as the first century AD, long before it had reached Rome. They were inspired by the story in the Book of Zechariah of how the Israelite prophet of the same name meets the Lord Himself, who is disguised as an architect:

I lifted up mine eyes again, and looked, and behold there was a man with a measuring line in his hand. Then said I, ‘Whither goest thou?’ And he said unto me, ‘To measure Jerusalem, to see what is the breadth thereof, and what is the length thereof.’

Consequently they wanted to reshape London as the New Jerusalem – the leading city of Christendom in a world free of papist rule. The idea of London as the New Jerusalem had long been envisaged by the enlightened. Even Charles I had promised it in a 1620 sermon: ‘For Here hath the Lord ordained the thrones of David, for judgement: and the charre of Moyses, for instruction, this Church, your Son indeed, others are but Synagogues, this your Jerusalem, the mother to them all.’ It was a theme later adopted by William Blake, among others, whose epic poem Jerusalem casts London as the holy city: ‘We builded Jerusalem as a City & a Temple’.

Wren, Hawksmoor and the other architects created a chain of buildings and features set apart by ‘sacred’ measurements. Two thousand cubits east of Wren’s favourite church, St Dunstan-in-the-East, they created a haven for intellectuals and free-thinkers on the site of an ancient well. This became Wellclose Square (→ p. 55), for centuries the most prosperous location in east London but now almost derelict. In the centre of the square was a Hawksmoor church which stood 2,000 cubits from his better-known (and still standing) Christ Church Spitalfields. And Christ Church is itself 2,000 cubits north-east of Hawksmoor’s St Mary Woolnoth by what is now Bank station.

The pattern continues with other well-known buildings from that period. Hawksmoor’s church of St George-in-the-East stands 2,000 cubits from the Roman wall. The site of the now partly demolished St Luke’s on Old Street is 2,000 cubits north of St Paul’s, and the site of another now demolished Hawksmoor church, St John Horselydown, just south of Tower Bridge, lies 2,000 cubits from the Monument, whose own setting is a masterpiece of maths and astronomy (→ p. 22).

ALL HALLOWS THE GREAT, 90 Upper Thames Street

One of England’s most extreme millennial sects, the Fifth Monarchy Men, was founded at this now demolished church in 1651. Exploiting the political and religious turmoil in the aftermath of the Civil War and the execution of Charles I, the Fifth Monarchy Men believed the days of earthly kings were over and sought to prepare the country for the imminent appearance of Jesus Christ himself as king.

Christ would rule the fifth kingdom outlined in the Old Testament Book of Daniel. (The first four, so they claimed, were those of the Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman empires.) But before he could do so a godly kingdom on earth – the Rule of the Saints – would violently replace the old order. The Fifth Monarchists consequently lauded the execution of King Charles and urged similar attacks on the rich as they stood in the way of the saintly kingdom.

In 1653 the Fifth Monarchists attained some influence in Oliver Cromwell’s new parliamentary assembly, so when he dissolved it that December and appointed himself Lord Protector – de facto king – the group felt betrayed. Three Fifth Monarchy Men were imprisoned for denouncing Cromwell, and their leader Thomas Harrison was expelled from the army. A Fifth Monarchist plot to overthrow the Lord Protector was uncovered in 1657 when its instigator, Thomas Venner, previously a minister at a church on Coleman Street in the City, was briefly imprisoned for planning to blow up the Tower of London.

On the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 Thomas Harrison was arrested and put to death for participating in Charles I’s execution. Now Venner took over. He led the Fifth Monarchy Men along a distinctly militant path. Infuriated by the torture and execution of Harrison and the popish leanings of the Church reformed around the new king, Charles II, Venner planned insurrection before Charles could be crowned. On New Year’s Day 1661 he and around fifty Fifth Monarchy rebels staged a violent but unsuccessful uprising in London. Shouting their war cry of ‘King Jesus and the heads upon the gates’, they attacked the major buildings of the City, as Samuel Pepys noted in his diary:

A great rising in the city of the Fifth-monarchy men, which did very much disturb the peace and liberty of the people, so that all the train-bands arose in arms, both in London and Westminster, as likewise all the king’s guards; and most of the noblemen mounted, and put all their servants on coach horses, for the defence of His Majesty, and the peace of his kingdom.

Around forty soldiers and civilians were killed. Venner was captured and executed outside his Coleman Street church. The Fifth Monarchy movement carried on briefly but then declined.

All Hallows the Great was demolished in the late nineteenth century for road widening.

→ Cromwell in Ireland, p. 297

BLACKFRIARS MONASTERY, Ireland Yard

It was in Blackfriars that the Archbishop of Canterbury’s council met in May 1382 to denounce John Wycliffe’s religious doctrines and his pioneering translation of the Bible into English.

As the hearing began, an earthquake, rare for London, rocked the City. Wycliffe, understandably, claimed the event as a sign of God’s discontent with the council’s hostile attitude to his reformist teachings. The council, with equal confidence, took the quake as proof of the Lord’s displeasure with Wycliffe.

As William Courtenay, the Archbishop of Canterbury, explained:

This earthquake foretells the purging of this kingdom from heresies, for as there are shut up in the bowels of the earth many noxious spirits which are expelled in an earthquake, and so the earth is cleansed but not without great violence, so there are many heresies shut up in the hearts of reprobate men, but by the condemnation of them, the kingdom is to be cleansed; but not without trouble and great commotion.

The synod then found against Wycliffe on twenty-four counts of heresy.

A 1529 court held at Blackfriars heard the divorce proceedings between Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII. The king had become increasingly frustrated at his wife’s inability to provide him with a male heir, despite seven pregnancies, so he sought permission from the Pope, Clement VII, to annul the marriage. Henry made a number of ingenious claims. First he said that he had committed incest by marrying Catherine as she had been the wife of his late brother, Arthur. There was much confusion over the Bible’s position on such a matter, but as Catherine swore that her marriage to Arthur had not been consummated the point was dropped. Henry then asked the Pope for an annulment on the grounds that the original papal dispensation to marry his late brother’s widow was invalid. Clement may well have wanted to help the king but was in the unfortunate position of being a prisoner of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the time and was unwilling to jeopardise his position any further.

Catherine was consequently brought before the court at Blackfriars on 18 June 1529. The king, the cardinals, the Archbishop of Canterbury and several other bishops attended the proceedings which ended inconclusively. Henry now exacted revenge on Wolsey, Archbishop of York and his leading minister, whom he blamed for the fiasco. Four years later Henry married Anne Boleyn and the Pope excommunicated him. Henry then broke England’s ties with Rome, declared himself head of the English Church and dissolved the monasteries. Blackfriars closed in 1538. Excavations conducted in 1890 and 1925 uncovered some remnants of the building but only a tiny portion of stone remains above ground.

→ Wycliffe in Oxford, p. 171

BRIDEWELL PRISON, Bridewell Place

The false messiah Elizeus Hall was sent to Bridewell Prison in 1562 after claiming to be a messenger from God who had been taken on a two-day visit to heaven and hell. In 1589 it was to Bridewell that one George Nichols was sent for being a Catholic priest. He and his associates, who had been arrested in Oxford (→ p. 174), were hung by their hands to make them betray their faith, but they refused to recant. They were all eventually hanged, drawn and quartered. The two founders of the Muggletonian sect, Lodowick Muggleton and John Reeve, were sent to Bridewell Prison in 1653 in an attempt to convince them to renounce their beliefs.

→ The Muggletonians, p. 23

CHEAPSIDE

In 1591 William Hacket paraded up and down Cheapside in a cart, claiming to be the messiah. His supporters believed Hacket was both the king of Europe and the angel who would appear at the Last Judgment. Hacket threatened to bring down a plague on England unless he was rightfully acknowledged, but when he announced that Queen Elizabeth had no right to the crown he was arrested for treason and executed. Hacket’s followers expected that divine intervention would save him, and were most vexed when none was forthcoming.

CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE-WITHOUT-NEWGATE, Holborn Viaduct

The largest parish church in the City of London, designed in a style similar to that of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, was founded in 1137. Indeed the distance from the church to the now demolished north-west gate of the City corresponded almost exactly with the distance inside its Jerusalem namesake from the Holy Sepulchre to the Calvary on which Jesus’ cross was placed. The London church became an appropriate starting point for the Crusaders on their journey to the Holy Land to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the Saracens.

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG’S VISION, Salisbury Court

While lodging in Salisbury Court in 1745 Emanuel Swedenborg, the major Swedish scientist-turned-mystic in whose name the New Church was founded after his death, had a religious vision. He described it to Thomas Hartley, rector of Winwick, as ‘the opening of his spiritual sight, the manifestation of the Lord to him in person’, and to his friend Robsahm as a vision of the Lord appearing before him announcing: ‘I am God the Lord, the Creator and Redeemer of the world. I have chosen thee to unfold the spiritual sense of the Holy Scripture. I will Myself dictate to thee what thou shalt write.’

In the vision Swedenborg met Jesus Christ who told him that humanity needed someone to explain the Scriptures properly and that he, Swedenborg, had been chosen for the task. He devoted the remaining twenty-eight years of his life to religion and wrote eighteen theological works, which were a major influence on William Blake. The New Church which his followers founded after his death continues to thrive.

→ Emanuel Swedenborg in the East End, p. 46

FIRE OF LONDON, Pudding Lane

The fire that destroyed much of the City in 1666 was connected to many of the religious controversies of the day. Indeed, to a number of religious commentators its outbreak on 2 September that year was no surprise. At the beginning of the year doom-mongers noted the worrying numerical conjunction of 1,000 (Christ’s millennium) with 666, the number of the Beast of the Book of Revelation. They predicted that London would turn into the fiery lake which according to the same book ‘burneth the fearful and unbelieving, the abominable, the murderers, the whoremongers, sorcerers, idolaters and liars’.

London would burn for being a city of sin, and two books published at the beginning of that year contained ominous predictions about the blaze. Daniel Baker in A Certaine Warning for a Naked Heart explained how London would be destroyed by a ‘consuming fire’, while Walter Gostelo in The Coming of God in Mercy, in Vengeance, Beginning with Fire, to Convert or Consume all this so Sinful City boasted: ‘If fire make not ashes of the City, and thy bones also, conclude me a liar for ever.’

Sure enough, on 2 September 1666, exactly a year after the Lord Mayor had ordered Londoners to light fires to burn out the Plague, the Great Fire of London broke out. Although at first many thought there was no reason for concern and that it would soon be contained, the Fire spread fast and eventually destroyed much of the capital, including eighty-six churches such as St Benet Sherhog and St Mary Magdalen Milk Street.

Immediately after the Fire the recriminations started. A local Catholic priest called Carpenter told his congregation that the flames ‘were come upon this land and people for the forsaking of the true Catholic religion’. Catholics pointed to at least a hundred years’ worth of transgressions by Londoners dating back to Henry VIII, whose defiance of the Pope in 1530 over his marriage to Catherine of Aragon broke the ties that bound the English Church to Rome, and led to the dissolution of the monasteries and abbeys. They pointed to the sins of Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarians, who had ordered the execution of the ‘holy’ king, Charles I, he who had lived a life of devotion and had ‘suffered martyrdom in defence of the most holy religion’. They also drew up a list of current sins – ‘the prodigious ingratitude, burning lusts, dissolute court, profane and abominable lives’, as John Evelyn detailed in his diary – in which the mostly Protestant population had indulged.

And for Protestants there was an alternative list of sins that a presumably different God had punished in the Fire of London, namely those of the corrupt Romish monasteries and abbeys which had perverted the ancient religion and accumulated excessive wealth while indulging in simony, fecundity and hypocrisy. They remembered the sins of the Catholic queen, Mary Tudor, who had sent some 300 Protestants to a violent death for heresy in the 1550s and blamed Catholic agitators for starting the Fire. Yet others believed that the Fire had been started by a Jew distraught that the supposed messiah, Shabbatai Zevi, who had claimed he would be crowned that month, had backed down when faced with the wrath of the Turkish Sultan (→ p. 69).

Soon after the Fire, rumours spread that Robert Hubert, a French silversmith, allegedly an agent of the French king, had started the blaze on the Pope’s orders. Hubert was arrested in east London. He admitted that he had left Sweden for the English capital and gone to Pudding Lane where he had used a long pole to lob a fireball through the window of Farriner’s bakery. Hubert boasted of twenty-three co-conspirators, but his confession was probably false: there was no window at Farriner’s bakery and no ship had sailed into east London from Sweden on the day he claimed to have arrived. Nevertheless he was a convenient scapegoat and was hanged at Tyburn (→ p. 79).

GREAT SYNAGOGUE (1690–1941), Duke’s Place

Used by Jews of north European descent (Ashkenazis) until it was destroyed in the Second World War, the Great Synagogue was the traditional seat of the chief rabbi, a post and office which do not exist in Jewish law. Consequently, some religious Jews claimed that the office of the Chief Rabbi had been created only to make Judaism more acceptable to the Church of England, and would mock the incumbent as the heimische Archbishop of Canterbury.

When a fire broke out in the Great Synagogue in the 1750s, Chaim Jacob Samuel Falk, the eighteenth-century mystic known as the Ba’al Shem of London (master of the secret names of God), is alleged to have extinguished it by inscribing on the jamb of the entrance the four Hebrew letters of God’s most-used name (Yahweh in English), supposedly causing the wind to change direction and the blaze to die down.

→ Falk in the East End, p. 55

HOLY TRINITY PRIORY ALDGATE, Mitre Square

The priory which opened in 1109 and soon became the grandest religious house in London, was the scene of one of the first recorded murders in London history. In 1530 Brother Martin, a priory monk, stabbed to death a woman praying at the high altar and then killed himself. The body of Catherine Eddowes, one of Jack the Ripper’s victims, was found on the same site more than 350 years later. Some Ripper experts believe Eddowes was killed elsewhere and the corpse placed there as part of a still unexplained ritualistic agenda.

After Henry VIII passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534 declaring himself head of the Church of England, he closed down establishments such as Holy Trinity. The priory surrendered its authority to the Crown by ‘mutual agreement’ and its incumbents were forced to embark on secular life. The buildings lay in ruins for some years and, even when the owners offered the stone free to any man who would take it down, there were no takers.

JEWRY STREET

The street was home in the sixteenth century to the first Jewish community allowed to live in the capital since Edward I expelled the Jews from Britain in 1291. Its number included Rodrigo Lopez, physician to Elizabeth I, who was once accused of participating in a plot to poison the queen and on whom Shakespeare partly based Shylock. Most of the new immigrant Jews came from Spain and Portugal, where they had been forced to convert to Christianity and were known by the insulting name marranos (Spanish for ‘swine’) due to their practice of hanging pigs outside their homes to show they had converted to Catholicism. After Oliver Cromwell officially allowed the Jews to return to the capital in 1656, this eastern edge of the City became the main centre of Jewish immigration into London. Their first new synagogue, on Creechurch Lane, has long been demolished.

JOHN WESLEY’S CONVERSION, Aldersgate Street by Ironmongers’ Hall

John Wesley, the early eighteenth-century preacher who founded Methodism, experienced an epiphany at Hall House, Nettleton Court on 24 May 1738. He later wrote that:

In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation.

→ Wesley in Bolton, p. 220

THE MONUMENT, Fish Street Hill

The tall Doric column just north of London Bridge was built as a memorial to the 1666 Great Fire of London but has many religious connections. It was designed by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke in 1671–7, and decorated by the artist Caius Gabriel Cibber during his daytime parole from debtors’ prison. He designed a relief depicting a female figure (London) grieving in front of burning buildings to recall the fallen Jerusalem from the Book of Lamentations ‘sitting solitary as a widow [that] weepeth sore in the night, her tears on her cheeks’.

Because so many people believed Catholics were responsible for the Fire, the Monument was given an inscription in 1681 (not removed until 1831) which blamed the disaster on the ‘treachery and malice of the Popish faction, in order to the effecting their horrid plot for the extirpating the Protestant religion and English liberties, and to introduce Popery and Heresy’. And just in case there was anyone who hadn’t fully received the message, another inscription by Farriner’s bakery, where the blaze began, stated that ‘here by permission of heaven hell broke loose upon this Protestant City from the malicious hearts of barbarous Papists . . .’

A best-selling pamphlet published at that time urged Protestants to go to the top of the tower and imagine the consequences of popish rule: ‘The whole town in flames, and amongst the distracted crowd, troops of Papists ravishing their [the Protestants’] wives and daughters, dashing out the brains of their little children against the walls, plundering their houses and cutting their throats in the name of heretic dogs.’

The Monument is the tallest stone column in the world, its height, 202 foot, being the same as the distance between it and the baker’s shop on nearby Pudding Lane where the Fire started. The 202-foot measurement was not randomly chosen. The Monument is positioned so that an observer looking east in the morning and west in the afternoon on the day of the summer solstice can see the sun sitting directly on top of the flaming urn of gilt bronze that crowns its top. Ingeniously the Monument also stands a distance of 2,000 cubits (a biblical measurement often used by architects wanting to imbue their buildings with ‘divine protection’) from Christ Church Spitalfields, designed by Christopher Wren’s assistant Nicholas Hawksmoor, and 2,000 cubits from the western end of Wren’s own St Paul’s Cathedral.

MUGGLETONIANS’ BIRTHPLACE, Bishopsgate

A seventeenth-century sect of radical puritans now practically extinct, the Muggletonians were established by Lodowick Muggleton, a Bishopsgate-born tailor, in 1651. That year he claimed that God had appointed him and his cousin, John Reeve, the Two Last Witnesses, as foretold in the verse in the Book of Revelation: ‘I will give power unto my two witnesses and they shall prophesy one thousand two hundred and threescore days clothed in sackcloth.’

The main tenets of the Muggletonians’ creed were:

1. God and the man Jesus Christ are synonymous expressions.

2. The devil and human reason are synonymous.

3. The soul dies and rises again with the body.

4. Heaven is a place above the stars.

5. At present hell is nowhere, but this earth, darkened after the last judgement, will be hell.

6. Angels are the only beings of pure reason.

Reeve was obsessed with the notion of mankind’s impending doom, and claimed he knew whom God had chosen to be saved. He and Muggleton were sent to Bridewell Prison for cursing a vicar, Mr Goffin, who subsequently died. The teachings of the two founders were handed down from generation to generation, but as the Muggletonians did not believe in proselytising, the sect slowly died out. For instance, in 1697 some 250 supporters attended Muggleton’s funeral, but by 1803 they were down to just over a hundred members, and a hundred years later only seventeen attended the monthly meeting. According to an article in the Times Literary Supplement, in 1974 a handful of believers were left in Kent. By the end of the decade there were only two remaining Muggletonians who by now may have verified tenet Number 4.

→ The Quakers, p. 226

OLD JEWRY

Now a nondescript City street of company offices, this was the centre of medieval Jewish life in London, when the street was known as Jewry. A Jewish community began to take shape here after William the Conqueror invited Jews from Normandy to London in the 1070s to help him improve Britain’s primitive trading practices. The king needed an advanced monetary system – payments made in coin not through barter – and such knowledge was the preserve of Jews, barred from most professions and public office throughout the continent but experts in money, commerce and finance because the Church forbade Christians from practising usury.

According to most modern histories there were no Jews in London, or even England, before the Norman Conquest. However, Jews had been coming to Britain since King Solomon sent tin traders from the Holy Land to negotiate with the miners of Cornwall some time around the year 960 BC. There were almost certainly Jews in London in Roman times: a brick recovered from the excavation of some Roman ruins on Mark Lane near the Tower in 1650 contained a relief of the story of Samson driving foxes into a field of corn – something which could not have been known to pagan, pre-Christian Romans.

Hostility to the Jews increased over the years, especially on anniversaries and celebrations that were particularly English in character. For instance, Jews were barred from attending the coronation of Richard I in 1189, but they sent a delegation to Westminster Hall nonetheless bearing gifts for the king, and a few sneaked into the hall to have a look at the proceedings. The palace guards threw them out, whereupon some onlookers started throwing stones. A rumour began circulating that the king had ordered the destruction of the Jews. In Jewry a mob set fire to Jewish houses and thirty people were killed. One Jew, Benedict of York, saved his life by converting to Christianity on the spot; he was rushed to St Margaret’s church and baptised (although he recanted his new views the next day). When the king learned what had happened he ordered the hanging of three of the ringleaders and announced that the Jews must not be so treated.

From that time the Jews were sent to the Tower for their own safety on such days. But soon excuses were being made to send the Jews to the Tower as a punishment for what were mostly fabricated accusations, usually involving coin clipping (chipping away at coins to use the metal), and allegations of murdering children to use their blood in religious sacrificial rituals.

King John treated the Jewish moneylenders well. He even granted them a charter and allowed them to choose a chief rabbi. But this détente didn’t last long. In 1210 the king levied a penalty of 66,000 marks on the Jews, and imprisoned, blinded and tortured those who would not pay.

Henry III compelled the Jews to wear two white tablets of linen or parchment on their breasts. Wherever Jews lived, burgesses were chosen to protect them from pilgrims’ insults about infidels. But in 1220 the Crown seized the Old Jewry synagogue and handed it to the brothers of St Anthony of Vienna for use as a church. In 1232 more pressure was put on the Jews to reject their religion when Henry built a House for Converted Jews on what is now Chancery Lane.

Jews were then expelled from Newcastle and Southampton. In London the status of the community began to deteriorate sharply after a dead Christian child was found in 1244, its arms and legs embroidered with Hebrew letters – a botched crucifixion, evidently. After a number of further tribulations the Jews asked King Henry if they could leave England officially. The king was outraged. Soon after, eighty-six of London’s richest Jews were hanged for supposedly crucifying a Christian child in Lincoln and there was a riot against London’s Jews. Five hundred were killed and the synagogue was burnt down. Only those who took refuge in the Tower survived.

Edward I, who came to the throne in 1272, forced the Jews to wear yellow badges so that everyone knew who they were (a symbol Hitler adopted nearly 700 years later). He also levied a tax of threepence on them every Easter. In 1288 all England’s Jews were imprisoned and held until they paid a £20,000 ransom, a handy sum to help finance the castles he was building in Wales. It came as no surprise when in 1290 Edward announced on 18 July – the anniversary of the sacking of the Temple in AD 70 – that he was expelling the Jews from England. All Jews (some 15,000) ‘with their wives, children and chattels’ had to leave the country, and they were given until 1 November, the feast of All Saints, to comply. Any Jew who remained behind after that date would face execution. Ships carrying Jews left St Katharine’s Dock near the Tower. When one vessel ran into a sandbank off Queensborough, Kent, the captain invited passengers to stretch their legs. But once they had disembarked he made off, leaving the party to drown as the tide rose.

The Crown seized all the Jews’ property and none of their buildings survive locally . . . above ground. Recent excavations of nearby sites during the building of the huge corporate blocks that dominate the area have unearthed well-preserved ritual baths and artefacts.

→ The Jews massacred in York, p. 207

ST DUNSTAN-IN-THE-WEST, Fleet Street at Hen and Chickens Court

Founded c. 1185 as St Dunstan’s Over Against the Temple, the church was known as St Dunstan-in-the-West from 1278 to differentiate it from St Dunstan-in-the-East in Stepney. It was here that William Tyndale, whose translations of the New Testament from the Greek provided the basis for the later King James Bible, preached in the 1520s. In the seventeenth century St Dunstan’s was a centre of Puritanism where Praise-God Barebones, the divinely named Roundhead leader, preached.

The church’s unusual-looking clock, the first in London to be marked with minutes, was erected in 1671 as a thanksgiving from parishioners relieved that a sudden burst of wind sent the Fire of London away from the building. The clock features two burly figures, Gog and Magog, biblical characters who appear cryptically in the Book of Revelation: ‘And ye shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.’ However, an ancient London legend tells of a character called Gogmagog – an Ancient Briton beaten in battle around the year 1000 BC by Brutus the Trojan, founder of London.

Today the church unites all major churches of Christendom: ‘Old Catholics, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Anglican Church, the Oriental churches, the Lutheran and Reformed Churches and the Holy Roman and Catholic Church’.

ST LAWRENCE JEWRY

John Wilkins, mid-seventeenth-century vicar of this exquisitely designed Christopher Wren church, devised a new system of measurement in the 1660s based on biblical ‘sacred geometry’. He wanted the main unit length to be equal to the 2,000 cubits cited as holy in the Book of Numbers. To make calculations easier the length would be divided not into 2,000 parts but into 1,000 equal divisions, what in the nineteenth century was renamed the metre, now a standard measurement, used extensively throughout the world, but, ironically, not universally in London.

→ London, Sacred City, p. 11

ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, St Paul’s Churchyard

Britain’s major cathedral, the setting for state occasions as well as one of the capital’s leading tourist attractions, was founded in 604 by Ethelbert, King of Kent, and Mellitus, Bishop of the East Saxons. The church was destroyed by the Vikings in the ninth century and burnt down in 1087, but at the end of the eleventh century William I granted St Paul’s privileges: ‘Some lands I give to God and the church of St Paul’s, in London, and special franchises, because I wish that this church may be free in all things, as I wish my soul to be on the day of judgment.’

In the thirteenth century Maurice, Bishop of London, decided to build a new grand cathedral on a larger scale than anything witnessed outside central Europe. It was this building, completed in 1240, that is now known as Old St Paul’s, to differentiate it from the post-Fire of London cathedral.

Not all clerics have been hospitably received here. In 1093 Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, came to St Paul’s demanding his tithe of the fruit harvest, only to find the doors closed in his face. In 1259 a mob killed two canons in the papal party. In 1385 Robert Braybroke, Bishop of London, banned various frivolous activities from taking place at St Paul’s on Sundays, including barbers shaving customers, worshippers shooting arrows at the pigeons and children playing ball. Nine years later the Lollard reformers nailed a paper listing twelve complaints about the Catholic clergy on the door of the old church – a hundred years before Martin Luther famously posted his ninety-six theses on popish indulgences on the door of the church in Wittenberg.

During the Reformation of the 1530s the high altar was pulled down and replaced by a plain table. Many of the tombs were also destroyed, the reredos was smashed to pieces and St Paul’s became more of a social centre than a church. The nave, Paul’s Walk, was even used by prostitutes touting for business, and as a market for selling groceries and animals. In 1553 the Common Council of London passed an act forbidding people from carrying beer barrels, baskets of bread, fish, flesh or fruit into St Paul’s and from leading mules or horses through the cathedral. Evidently the law didn’t go far enough, for in 1558 Elizabeth had to issue a proclamation forbidding the drawing of swords in the church and the shooting of guns inside it or in the churchyard, under pain of two months’ imprisonment.

St Paul’s collection of holy relics was sold off during the Cromwellian Commonwealth of 1649–60, but there appeared to be an inexhaustible stock of these. The authorities were still selling portions of the Virgin Mary’s milk, the hair of Mary Magdalen, the hand of St John, pieces of Thomas à Becket’s skull and the blood of St Paul himself – all preserved in jewelled cases – 150 years later.

The Fire of London destroyed Old St Paul’s in 1666, but the building was spectacularly redesigned by Christopher Wren, who created what many believe to be the finest example of Renaissance architecture in Britain. Somehow St Paul’s escaped destruction during the Second World War Blitz.

PAUL’S CROSS

An open-air pulpit erected by the south wall of the pre-Fire of London St Paul’s was known as Paul’s Cross. Here papal bulls were broadcast, excommunications pronounced, royal proclamations made and heresies denounced at what was a kind of medieval Speakers’ Corner. It was also where the earliest English Bibles were burnt before the authorities decided to allow the people to hear the Scriptures in their native tongue.

In 1422 Richard Walker, a Worcester chaplain, appeared at Paul’s Cross on charges of sorcery. Two books on magic which he had been caught reading were then burnt before his eyes. In 1447 Reginald Pecock, Bishop of Chichester, was made to kneel here before the Archbishop of Canterbury and around 20,000 onlookers to make a full confession of his ‘errors’. That was how his captors described his writings, which were then cast into the fire as a warning of the fate that might soon befall him.

Preacher Beal stirred up the crowd so passionately on May Day 1517 that riots broke out across London as the mob attacked foreign merchants on what came to be called Evil May Day. Troops managed to restore order and took 400 rioters as prisoners. The leaders of the riots were hanged, drawn and quartered.

On 12 May 1521 an unusual book, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (The Defence of the Seven Sacraments), setting out Catholic arguments against the new Protestant creed being propounded by Martin Luther in Germany, was unveiled at Paul’s Cross. The author was supposedly none other than Henry VIII, the jousting, hunting, non-bookish king. Though few believed that Henry was capable of such writing, evidence shows that the king was indeed the author of the work, which he dedicated to the Pope and which earned him the title ‘Defender of the Faith’.

Copies of William Tyndale’s pioneering English translation of the Bible were burnt here in 1526, shortly after they had been smuggled into the country. They were selling in London for three shillings, but those found with such a Bible were made to ride backward on a donkey and wear a pasteboard mitre emblazoned with some of the offending passages. Tied to their backs were symbolic faggots of wood which they had to hurl into a bonfire as a warning of what would happen to them soon at Smithfield if they continued with their heretical reading.

The Rood of Grace (→ p. 132), a wooden cross bearing an image that could supposedly move and speak if approached by one who had lived a pure life, was smashed to pieces under the king’s orders at Paul’s Cross in 1538. Two years later it was here that William Jerome, the vicar of St Dunstan and All Saints, was burnt alive for preaching an Anabaptist sermon (belittling infant baptism).

Crowds would gather at Paul’s Cross to hear contentious sermons, which often resulted in trouble. For instance in 1549 preachers incited the onlookers to sack the cathedral itself, and a mob tore inside, destroyed the altar and smashed several tombs. At the first sermon preached here following the death of the Protestant king, Edward VI, on 6 July 1553 Bishop Bourne provoked the crowd by denouncing the Protestant Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley. A group of spectators began shouting: ‘He preaches damnation! Pull him down! Pull him down!’ Someone threw a dagger at Bourne. It stuck in one of the wooden side posts and the bishop was rushed into St Paul’s school for his own safety. In their desperation to exact revenge, the authorities arrested several people and imprisoned them in the Tower, while a priest and a barber had their ears nailed to the pillory at Paul’s Cross.

Ridley himself soon made his stand here. On 16 July he denounced both royal princesses, Mary and Elizabeth, daughters of Henry VIII, as illegitimate and singled out Mary for special abuse as she was a papist. Ridley believed that Lady Jane Grey, great-granddaughter of Henry VII, should take the throne as the best way of preserving a Protestant succession – which she did but for only nine days.

In April 1584 the Bishop of London preached here against astrologers who were predicting the end of the world owing to an imminent conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. On 7 February 1601 the Earl of Essex, at the conclusion of the sermon at Paul’s Cross, led a group of 300 rebels through the City shouting: ‘Murder, murder, God save the Queen!’ in protest at how England was supposedly about to be handed to the Spanish when Queen Elizabeth died. He was arrested and executed on Tower Hill a month later.

The Puritans pulled down Paul’s Cross in 1643.

ST PAUL’S CHURCHYARD

When Pope Pius V became pontiff in February 1570 he issued a papal bull, Regnans in Excelsis, urging Catholics to overthrow Elizabeth, ‘pretended Queen of England’. The Catholics believed Elizabeth was technically illegitimate as they did not recognise her mother, Anne Boleyn, the Protestant who had replaced the Catholic Catherine of Aragon in Henry’s favours, as being legitimately married to the king.

Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth, freeing her subjects from their allegiance to her. It was an absurd move as no Catholic European power was in a position to enforce his wishes. It also meant that from now on the queen would treat all Catholics as the enemy. A Catholic called John Felton pinned the papal bull to the gate of the Bishop of London’s palace and was duly hanged in St Paul’s Churchyard. Cut down while still alive, he supposedly shouted out the holy name of Jesus as the hangman held his heart in his hand.

George Williams was one of a dozen men who established the Young Men’s Christian Association above a draper’s shop in St Paul’s Churchyard in 1844. Their aim was to unite and direct ‘the efforts of Christian young men for the spiritual welfare of their fellows in the various departments of commercial life’. Soon other branches were formed, first in London, and then throughout the world.

SMITHFIELD EXECUTION SITE, West Smithfield

Originally the Smooth Field, this was Britain’s major execution site for Protestant martyrs in medieval times, where hundreds lost their lives.

The method of execution used at Smithfield was nearly always burning at the stake before a large crowd. Though gruesome, it was carried out in a far more humane manner than on the continent, where heretics often had their tongues cut off before the pyre was lit. In England burning occurred only after a series of rigorous trials had taken place and the condemned had been given the chance of recanting their views.

A dramatic preamble to the grim fate was the ceremony known as ‘carrying the faggot’. The alleged heretic, carrying a faggot of wood, would be taken to the place of execution. There a fire had been lit, and the accused would throw the faggot on to the fire and watch it burn as a warning that if they remained steadfast in their views they would be next for the flames. Before the pyre was lit, the victim’s friends and family would try to bribe the executioner to place a bag of gunpowder by the body. That way, when the flames rose, the gunpowder would explode and kill the poor wretch quickly, sparing them the slow torture of burning. This could not happen of course if it had been raining.

The first martyr to meet his death here was William Sawtrey, a priest and follower of the Bible translator John Wycliffe, who went to the stake in 1401. Sawtrey’s card was marked when he announced ‘instead of adoring the cross on which Christ suffered, I adore Christ who suffered on it’. In 1399 the Bishop of Norwich questioned Sawtrey over his beliefs, and had him arrested and imprisoned on charges of heresy. Sawtrey recanted his views and was released but felt that he had betrayed Christ. Two years later Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, had Sawtrey arrested again. After questioning Sawtrey, the Church authorities deemed ‘unacceptable’ his views on transubstantiation and the adoration of the cross and declared him indeed a heretic, which meant only one thing – he had to be put to death by burning.

The list of Smithfield martyrs includes:

• John Badby, 1410

Badby, a Worcester tailor, got into trouble in 1410 after telling the local diocesan court that when Christ sat at the Last Supper with his disciples he did not have his body in his hand to distribute and that ‘if every host consecrated at the altar were the Lord’s body, then there be 20,000 Gods in England’. A court at St Paul’s sentenced him to be burnt to death. Just before Badby met his fate the watching Prince of Wales (the future Henry V) offered him his life and a pension if he would recant, but Badby would not do so. As the flames began to rise he cried out: ‘It is consecrated bread and not the body of God.’

• John Frith, 1533

A colleague of the Bible translator William Tyndale, Frith fled to the continent when the persecution of Protestants began in the 1520s. He later returned to England, travelling from congregation to congregation where Catholicism had been ousted following the Reformation. Frith was arrested in 1532 and sent to the Tower of London, where he was chained to a post. Things improved, though, and for a while Frith was allowed to have friends visit his cell. But the authorities soon decided to bring Frith before the bishops to repent his ‘heresies’, such as denying that the bread and wine at consecration actually turn into Jesus’ flesh and blood. When he refused to do so, he was taken to a dungeon under Newgate Prison and, according to Andersen, his biographer, ‘laden with irons, as many as he could bear, neither stand upright, nor stoop down’.

At least Frith had only one night of these horrors, for the next day he and a fellow sufferer, Hewett, were taken to Smithfield and bound to the stake to be burnt. ‘The wind made his death somewhat longer, as it bore away the flame from him to his fellow,’ Andersen explained, ‘but Frith’s mind was established with such patience, that, as though he had felt no pain, he seemed rather to rejoice for his fellow than to be careful for himself.’

• John Lambert, 1537

Lambert was summoned before a religious court on suspicion of having converted to Protestantism. He remained silent, like Jesus before his accusers, and in doing so was instrumental in bringing about a change in the law whereby it was decreed no man can accuse himself – nemo tenetur edere contra se. It didn’t save his life, and he was burnt at Smithfield in 1537. When Lambert’s legs had been charred to stumps, he was taken from the fire, but he cried out, ‘None but Christ, none but Christ,’ and was dropped into the flames again.

• John Forest, 1538

Forest, a preacher who opposed Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, was the only Catholic to be burnt at the stake at Smithfield for heresy. With Forest on a bed of chains suspended over the pyre, the executioner added a huge wooden holy relic as the martyr slowly roasted. When the flames reached his feet he lifted them up before lowering them again into the fire.

Another who lost his life that year was a man, recorded only as ‘Collins’, who was executed for mocking the Mass in church by lifting a dog above his head.

• Edward Powell and others, 1540

30 July 1540 was a busy day for the Smithfield executioners: that day three Catholics, Edward Powell, Thomas Abel and Richard Featherstone, went to their doom alongside three Protestants, Robert Barnes, Thomas Gerard and William Jerome.

Powell was that rarity, a Welsh Catholic. He was a rector in Somerset and a preacher favoured by Henry VIII. He was one of four clerics selected to defend the legality of the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the validity of which was questioned as she had been married to Henry’s late brother, Arthur. Powell later criticised Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn (Catherine’s replacement) and this resulted in his arraignment for high treason.

Abel had been a chaplain to Catherine of Aragon and continued to support the queen when Henry began divorce proceedings. The king had Abel thrown into the Beauchamp Tower, where he spent six years before being taken to Smithfield and executed for denying royal supremacy over the Church.

Featherstone was also a chaplain to Catherine of Aragon and a tutor to Mary Tudor, her daughter. In 1534 he was asked to take the Oath of Supremacy but refused to do so and was imprisoned in the Tower. After Powell, Abel and Featherstone’s execution their limbs were fixed to the gates of the city and their heads displayed on poles on London Bridge.

Barnes, Gerard and Jerome, the Protestants, were prosecuted for supporting the doctrines of the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli. Of the three, Barnes was the most interesting character. Henry VIII sent him to Germany in 1535 to encourage disciples of Martin Luther to give their approval to the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. By the year of Barnes’s execution Henry had decided to oppose Luther’s reforms vehemently. Barnes had made a speech at Paul’s Cross attacking a rival cleric, which caused turmoil within the different factions of the king’s council. Barnes was forced to apologise but it wasn’t enough to save him.

• John Rogers, 1555

A Bible translator, Rogers became the first Protestant martyr to be executed during the reign of the Catholic queen, Mary Tudor, when he was burnt at Smithfield on 4 February 1555. Rogers had produced only the second complete English Bible (published 1537), the first to be translated into English from the original Hebrew and Greek. He printed it under the pseudonym Thomas Matthew, but much of it was the work of William Tyndale, whose pioneering English translation had caused the Church such distress.

Prior to his execution, Rogers was asked by Woodroofe, the Newgate Prison sheriff, if he would revoke his ‘evil opinion of the Sacrament of the altar’. Rogers replied: ‘That which I have preached I will seal with my blood.’ When Woodroofe responded, ‘Thou art an heretic,’ Rogers retorted, ‘That shall be known at the Day of Judgment’.

On the way to Smithfield Rogers saw his wife and eleven children in the crowd, but was not allowed to talk to them. He died quickly for the flames soon raged. Nevertheless he was courageous enough to pretend to be washing his hands in the fire as if it had been cold water. He then lifted them in the air and prayed. As he died a flock of doves flew above, leading one supporter to claim that one of the birds was the Holy Ghost himself.

• Roger Holland, 1556

Holland was one of forty men and women convicted for staging prayers and Bible study in a walled garden in Islington. With the Catholic Mary Tudor on the throne, such practices were no longer considered acceptable, for the ruling Catholic ideology wanted only priests to read the Bible and even then only in Latin (not its original language). Holland and others believed they were safe from hostile prying eyes, but they were spotted and arrested by the Constable of Islington, who demanded they hand over their books. The Bible readers were taken to Newgate Prison where they were informed they would be released as long as they agreed to hear Mass. Most of them refused to do so.

When Holland was taken to the stake he embraced the bundles of reeds placed there to fuel the fire and announced: ‘Lord, I most humbly thank Thy Majesty that Thou hast called me from the state of death, unto the Light of Thy Heavenly Word, and now unto the fellowship of Thy saints that I may sing and say, “Holy holy holy, Lord God of hosts!” Lord, into Thy hands I commit my spirit. Lord bless these Thy people, and save them from idolatry.’

• Edward Arden, 1583

A Catholic from the same Warwickshire family as Shakespeare’s mother, Arden was probably the innocent victim of a Catholic plot to overthrow Queen Elizabeth. He died protesting his innocence, claiming that his only crime was to be a Catholic. His son-in-law John Somerville, who was implicated alongside him, was tortured on the rack, after which he implicated others. Somerville was found strangled in his cell before he could be executed.

• Edward Wightman, 1612

Wightman was the last man burnt alive in England for his religious views – he was a Baptist. At the time, James I, not a particularly bloodthirsty zealot in the Mary manner, was on the throne and the burnings had almost ceased. As the historian Thomas Fuller once noted: ‘James preferred heretics should silently and privately waste themselves away in the prison, rather than to grace them, and amuse others, with the solemnity of a public execution.’

→ Hangings at Tyburn, p. 51

SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE SYNAGOGUE, Bevis Marks and Heneage Lane

What is now Britain’s oldest synagogue was built in 1701 on the site of the Abbot of Bury St Edmunds’s town house with its entrance on the side of the building as the City authorities were worried about the reaction of non-Jews walking past a synagogue door. Bevis Marks was opened for Iberian Jews whom Oliver Cromwell had officially allowed to return to England in 1656. (The community’s first synagogue, on nearby Creechurch Lane, no longer exists.)

Bevis Marks’s register of births includes that of Benjamin D’Israeli (later Disraeli) in 1804. Despite his Jewish conception, the future Tory prime minister was baptised at St Andrew’s, Holborn, after his father rowed with the synagogue authorities. The baptism allowed Disraeli to become a Member of Parliament and later prime minister. Services are still held in Portuguese, as well as Hebrew.

THE TEMPLE

The Inner and Middle Temple, two of London’s four Inns of Court where lawyers live and work, takes its name from the Knights Templar, a body of French warrior monks, founded in 1129, who protected pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land. Gradually the Knights Templar became ever more powerful until Pope Clement V disbanded them in 1312 and handed their assets to their rivals, the Knights Hospitaller (the Order of St John of Jerusalem). They now became wealthy landowners, buying this estate in London which they leased to lawyers. The Knights Hospitaller themselves had their possessions seized by the English Crown in 1539.

Unofficially the Templars still exist, controlling affairs through their semi-secret offspring organisation, the Freemasons. In recent years various individuals and esoteric groups claiming to represent the Templars have emerged, mostly because of the publicity given to them by the success of the Dan Brown novel The Da Vinci Code. It remains to be seen whether they will try to claim ownership of Temple Church, especially now that a body calling itself the Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ has launched a court case in Spain, demanding that the Pope ‘recognise’ the seizure of their assets worth some €100 bn.

→ The Knights Templars in Warwickshire, p. 188

TEMPLE BAR

The historical boundary between the ancient cities of London and Westminster, marked by a statue where the Strand meets Fleet Street, was the site of the Pope-burning ceremonies of the late seventeenth century. Every year on 17 November, the anniversary of the accession of Elizabeth I, an effigy of the Pope, seated in his chair of state, would be carried through the local streets in mockery of the papal coronation ceremony, by people dressed as Catholic clergymen. When the train reached Temple Bar bonfires were lit and the ‘Pope’ was cremated.

TEMPLE CHURCH, Inner Temple Lane

Since the early twenty-first-century publication of Dan Brown’s religious thriller The Da Vinci Code, much public interest has centred on Temple Church, London’s oldest Gothic building, which features in the novel. The church was built from 1160–85 in the style of the Church of the Sepulchre in Jerusalem. A door in the north-west corner of the choir leads to the penitential cell where knights who had broken Temple rules were imprisoned and in some cases starved to death. One such wrongdoer was the deserter Adam de Valaincourt, who was sentenced to eat meat with the dogs for a whole year, to fast four days each week, and to appear naked every Monday at the high altar, where the priest would publicly reprimand him.

→ Rosslyn Chapel, p. 274

TEMPLE OF MITHRAS, 11 Queen Victoria Street

A Roman temple 60 foot long and 26 foot wide built by the Walbrook stream and dedicated to the light god, Mithras, was discovered in 1954 when the ground was dug up for the construction of an office block. The worship of Mithras, which began in Persia in the first century BC and was open only to men, was carried out in caves, Mithraea, one of which was excavated in London near the site now occupied by Mansion House. The artefacts are housed in the Museum of London.