"Walkers, whosoe"er ye bee, If it prove you chance to see, Upon a solemn scarlet day, The City senate pa.s.s this way, Their grateful memory for to show, Which they the reverent ashes owe Of Bishop Norman here inhumed, By whom this city has a.s.sumed Large privileges; those obtained By him when Conqueror William reigned.
This being by Barkham"s thankful mind renewed, Call it the monument of grat.i.tude."
The ruthless Conqueror granted valuable privileges to St. Paul"s. He freed the church from the payment of Danegeld, and all services to the Crown. His words (if they are authentic) are--"Some lands I give to G.o.d 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 this same reign the Primate Lanfranc held a great council at St. Paul"s--a council which Milman calls "the first full Ecclesiastical Parliament of England." Twelve years after (1087), the year the Conqueror died, fire, that persistent enemy of St. Paul"s, almost entirely consumed the cathedral.
Bishop Maurice set to work to erect a more splendid building, with a vast crypt, in which the valuable remains of St. Erkenwald were enshrined. William of Malmesbury ranked it among the great buildings of his time. One of the last acts of the Conqueror was to give the stone of a Palatine tower (on the subsequent site of Blackfriars) for the building. The next bishop, De Balmeis, is said to have devoted the whole of his revenues for twenty years to this pious work. Fierce Rufus--no friend of monks--did little; but the milder monarch, Henry I., granted exemption of toll to all vessels, laden with stone for St. Paul"s, that entered the Fleet.
To enlarge the area of the church, King Henry gave part of the Palatine Tower estate, which was turned into a churchyard and encircled with a wall, which ran along Carter Lane to Creed Lane, and was freed of buildings. The bishop, on his part, contributed to the service of the altar the rents of Paul"s Wharf, and for a school gave the house of Durandus, at the corner of Bell Court. On the bishop"s death, the Crown seized his wealth, and the bishop"s boots were carried to the Exchequer full of gold and silver. St. Bernard, however, praises him, and says: "It was not wonderful that Master Gilbert should be a bishop; but that the Bishop of London should live like a poor man, that was magnificent."
In the reign of Stephen a dreadful fire broke out and raged from London Bridge to St. Clement Danes. In this fire St. Paul"s was partially destroyed. The Bishop, in his appeals for contributions to the church, pleaded that this was the only London church specially dedicated to St.
Paul. The citizens of London were staunch advocates of King Stephen against the Empress Maud, and at their folkmote, held at the Cheapside end of St. Paul"s, claimed the privilege of naming a monarch.
In the reign of Henry II. St. Paul"s was the scene of a strange incident connected with the quarrel between the King and that ambitious Churchman, the Primate Becket. Gilbert Foliot, the learned and austere Bishop of London, had sided with the King and provoked the bitter hatred of Becket. During the celebration of ma.s.s a daring emissary of Becket had the boldness to thrust a roll, bearing the dreaded sentence of excommunication against Foliot, into the hands of the officiating priest, and at the same time to cry aloud--"Know all men that Gilbert, Bishop of London, is excommunicated by Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury!" Foliot for a time defied the interdict, but at last bowed to his enemy"s authority, and refrained from entering the Church of St.
Paul"s.
The reign of Richard I. was an eventful one to St. Paul"s. In 1191, when Coeur de Lion was in Palestine, Prince John and all the bishops met in the nave of St. Paul"s to arraign William de Longchamp, one of the King"s regents, of many acts of tyranny. In the reign of their absentee monarch the Londoners grew mutinous, and their leader, William Fitzosbert, or Longbeard, denounced their oppressors from Paul"s Cross.
These disturbances ended in the siege of Bow Church, where Fitzosbert had fortified himself, and by the burning alive of him and other ringleaders. It was at this period that Dean Radulph de Diceto, a monkish chronicler of learning, built the Deanery, "inhabited," says Milman, "after him, by many men of letters;" before the Reformation, by the admirable Colet; after the Reformation by Alexander Nowell, Donne, Sancroft (who rebuilt the mansion after the Great Fire), Stillingfleet, Tillotson, W. Sherlock, Butler, Secker, Newton, Van Mildert, Copleston, and Milman.
St. Paul"s was also the scene of one of those great meetings of prelates, abbots, deans, priors, and barons that finally led to King John"s concession of Magna Charta. On this solemn occasion--so important for the progress of England--the Primate Langton displayed the old charter of Henry I. to the chief barons, and made them sacredly pledge themselves to stand up for Magna Charta and the liberties of England.
One of the first acts of King Henry III. was to hold a council in St.
Paul"s, and there publish the Great Charter. Twelve years after, when a Papal Legate enthroned himself in St. Paul"s, he was there openly resisted by Cantelupe, Bishop of Worcester.
Papal power in this reign attained its greatest height in England. On the death of Bishop Roger, an opponent of these inroads, the King gave orders that out of the episcopal revenue 1,500 poor should be feasted on the day of the conversion of St. Paul, and 1,500 lights offered in the church. The country was filled with Italian prelates. An Italian Archbishop of Canterbury, coming to St. Paul"s, with a cuira.s.s under his robes, to demand first-fruits from the Bishop, found the doors closed in his face; and two canons of the Papal party, endeavouring to install themselves at St. Paul"s, were in 1259 killed by the angry populace.
In the reign of this weak king several folkmotes of the London citizens were held at Paul"s Cross, in the churchyard. On one occasion the king himself, and his brother, the King of Almayne, were present. All citizens, even to the age of twelve, were sworn to allegiance, for a great outbreak for liberty was then imminent. The inventory of the goods of Bishop Richard de Gravesend, Bishop of London for twenty-five years of this reign, is still preserved in the archives of St. Paul"s. It is a roll twenty-eight feet long. The value of the whole property was nearly 3,000, and this sum (says Milman) must be multiplied by about fifteen to bring it to its present value.
When the citizens of London justly ranged themselves on the side of Simon de Montfort, who stood up for their liberties, the great bell of St. Paul"s was the tocsin that summoned the burghers to arms, especially on that memorable occasion when Queen Eleanor tried to escape by water from the Tower to Windsor, where her husband was, and the people who detested her tried to sink her barge as it pa.s.sed London Bridge.
In the equally troublous reign of Edward II. St. Paul"s was again splashed with blood. The citizens, detesting the king"s foreign favourites, rose against the Bishop of Exeter, Edward"s regent in London. A letter from the queen, appealing to them, was affixed to the cross in Cheapside. The bishop demanded the City keys of the Lord Mayor, and the people sprang to arms, with cries of "Death to the queen"s enemies!" They cut off the head of a servant of the De Spensers, burst open the gates of the Bishop of Exeter"s palace (Ess.e.x Street, Strand), and plundered, sacked, and destroyed everything. The bishop, at the time riding in the Islington fields, hearing the danger, dashed home, and made straight for sanctuary in St. Paul"s. At the north door, however, the mob thickening, tore him from his horse, and, hurrying him into Cheapside, proclaimed him a traitor, and beheaded him there, with two of his servants. They then dragged his body back to his palace, and flung the corpse into the river.
In the inglorious close of the glorious reign of Edward III., Courtenay, Bishop of London, an inflexible prelate, did his best to induce some of the London rabble to plunder the Florentines, at that time the great bankers and money-lenders of the metropolis, by reading at Paul"s Cross the interdict Gregory XI. had launched against them; but on this occasion the Lord Mayor, leading the princ.i.p.al Florentine merchants into the presence of the aged king, obtained the royal protection for them.
Wycliffe and his adherents (amongst whom figured John of Gaunt--"old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster"--Chaucer"s patron) soon brewed more trouble in St. Paul"s for the proud bishop. The great reformer being summoned to an ecclesiastical council at St. Paul"s, was accompanied by his friends, John of Gaunt and the Earl Marshal, Lord Percy. When in the lady chapel Percy demanded a soft seat for Wycliffe.
The bishop said it was law and reason that a cited man should stand before the ordinary. Angry words ensued, and the Duke of Lancaster taunted Courtenay with his pride. The bishop answered, "I trust not in man, but in G.o.d alone, who will give me boldness to speak the truth." A rumour was spread that John of Gaunt had threatened to drag the bishop out of the church by the hair, and that he had vowed to abolish the t.i.tle of Lord Mayor. A tumult began. All through the City the billmen and bowmen gathered. The Savoy, John of Gaunt"s palace, would have been burned but for the intercession of the bishop. A priest mistaken for Percy was murdered. The duke fled to Kensington, and joined the Princess of Wales.
Richard II., that dissolute, rash, and unfortunate monarch, once only (alive) came to St. Paul"s in great pomp, his robes hung with bells, and afterwards feasted at the house of his favourite, Sir Nicholas Brember, who was eventually put to death. The Lollards were now making way, and Archbishop Courtenay had a great barefooted procession to St. Paul"s to hear a famous Carmelite preacher inveigh against the Wycliffe doctrines.
A Lollard, indeed, had the courage to nail to the doors of St. Paul"s twelve articles of the new creed denouncing the mischievous celibacy of the clergy, transubstantiation, prayers for the dead, pilgrimages, and other mistaken and idolatrous usages. When Henry Bolingbroke (not yet crowned Henry IV.) came to St. Paul"s to offer prayer for the dethronement of his ill-fated cousin, Richard, he paused at the north side of the altar to shed tears over the grave of his father, John of Gaunt, interred early that very year in the Cathedral. Not long after the shrunken body of the dead king, on its way to the Abbey, was exposed in St. Paul"s, to prove to the populace that Richard was not still alive. Hardynge, in his chronicles (quoted by Milman), says that the usurping king and his n.o.bles spread--some seven, some nine--cloths of gold on the bier of the murdered king.
Bishop Braybroke, in the reign of Edward IV., was strenuous in denouncing ecclesiastical abuses. Edward III. himself had denounced the resort of mechanics to the refectory, the personal vices of the priests, and the pilfering of sacred vessels. He restored the communion-table, and insisted on daily alms-giving. But Braybroke also condemned worse abuses. He issued a prohibition at Paul"s Cross against barbers shaving on Sundays; he forbade the buying and selling in the Cathedral, the flinging stones and shooting arrows at the pigeons and jackdaws nestling in the walls of the church, and the playing at ball, both within and without the church, a practice which led to the breaking of many beautiful and costly painted windows.
But here we stop awhile in our history of St. Paul"s, on the eve of the sanguinary wars of the Roses, to describe mediaeval St. Paul"s, its structure, and internal government. Foremost among the relics were two arms of St. Mellitus (miraculously enough, of quite different sizes).
Behind the high altar--what Dean Milman justly calls "the pride, glory, and fountain of wealth" to St. Paul"s--was the body of St. Erkenwald, covered with a shrine which three London goldsmiths had spent a whole year in chiselling; and this shrine was covered with a grate of tinned iron. The very dust of the chapel floor, mingled with water, was said to work instantaneous cures. On the anniversary of St. Erkenwald the whole clergy of the diocese attended in procession in their copes. When King John of France was made captive at Poictiers, and paid his orisons at St. Paul"s, he presented four golden basins to the high altar, and twenty-two n.o.bles at the shrine of St. Erkenwald. Milman calculates that in 1344 the oblation-box alone at St. Paul"s produced an annual sum to the dean and chapter of 9,000. Among other relics that were milch cows to the monks were a knife of our Lord, some hair of Mary Magdalen, blood of St. Paul, milk of the Virgin, the hand of St. John, pieces of the mischievous skull of Thomas a Becket, and the head and jaw of King Ethelbert. These were all preserved in jewelled cases. One hundred and eleven anniversary ma.s.ses were celebrated. The chantry chapels in the Cathedral were very numerous, and they were served by an army of idle and often dissolute ma.s.s priests. There was one chantry in Pardon Churchyard, on the north side of St. Paul"s, east of the bishop"s chapel, where St. Thomas Becket"s ancestors were buried. The grandest was one near the nave, built by Bishop Kemp, to pray for himself and his royal master, Edward IV. Another was founded by Henry IV. for the souls of his father, John of Gaunt, and his mother, Blanche of Castile. A third was built by Lord Mayor Pulteney, who was buried in St. Lawrence Pulteney, so called from him. The revenues of these chantries were vast.
But to return to our historical sequence. During the ruthless Wars of the Roses St. Paul"s became the scene of many curious ceremonials, on which Shakespeare himself has touched, in his early historical plays. It was on a platform at the cathedral door that Roger Bolingbroke, the spurious necromancer who was supposed to have aided the ambitious designs of the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of Gloucester, was exhibited. The d.u.c.h.ess"s penance for the same offence, according to Milman"s opinion, commenced or closed near the cathedral, in that shameful journey when she was led through the streets wrapped in a sheet, and carrying a lighted taper in her hand. The duke, her husband, was eventually buried at St. Paul"s, where his tomb became the haunt of needy men about town, whence the well-known proverb of "dining with Duke Humphrey."
Henry VI."s first peaceful visit to St. Paul"s is quaintly sketched by that dull old poet, Lydgate, who describes "the bishops _in pontificalibus_, the Dean of Paules and canons, every one who conveyed the king"
"Up into the church, with full devout singing; And when he had made his offering, The mayor, the citizens, bowed and left him."
While all the dark troubles still were pending, we find the Duke of York taking a solemn oath 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, On Lady Day in Lent, this peace was wrought; The King, the Queen, with lords many an one, To worship the Virgin as they ought, Went in procession, and spared right nought In sight of all the commonalty; In token this love was in heart and thought, Rejoice England in concord and unity."
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CHURCH OF ST. FAITH, THE CRYPT OF OLD ST. PAUL"S, FROM A VIEW BY HOLLAR.]
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, 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 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 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 Crookback, 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 were publicly read. Jane Sh.o.r.e, 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. PAUL"S AFTER THE FALL OF THE SPIRE, FROM A VIEW BY HOLLAR (_see page 244_).]
Richard"s crown was presently beaten into a hawthorn bush on Bosworth Field, and his defaced, 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 Katherine of Arragon. The whole church was hung with tapestry, and there 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. The Dean and Chapter of St. Paul"s were among the trustees for the endowment he left, and the Cathedral still possesses the royal testament.
A Venetian amba.s.sador who was present has left a graphic description of one of the earliest 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 n.o.bility 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 n.o.bles wore ma.s.sive 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 Lollard"s 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.ses were said at this before the king, while high ma.s.s was being sung to the rest. 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.
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 ma.s.s, censed 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 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 to totally 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 f.a.gots 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 G.o.d and the Catholic Church, and were then led three times round the fire, which they fed with the f.a.gots they had carried.
Four years later, after Wolsey"s fall, the London clergy were summoned to St. Paul"s Chapter-house (near the south side). The king, offended at the Church having yielded to Wolsey"s claims as a papal legate, by which the penalty of praemunire had been incurred, had demanded from it 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 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 ex-bishop of Rochester preached a sermon at Paul"s Cross recanting his heresy, four of his late fellow-prisoners in Newgate having obstinately perished at the stake.
In the reign of Edward VI. St. Paul"s witnessed far different scenes.
The year of the accession of the child-king, funeral service was read to the memory of Francis I., Latin dirges were chanted, and eight mitred bishops sang a requiem to the monarch lately deceased. At the 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.