Eric Parker

Croydon Palace.—A Neglected Relic.—Queen Elizabeth's Waiters.—John Whitgift.—Hospital, chapel, and school.—A Record of Cricket.—Macaulay's tyrant.—Izaak Walton differs.—Queen Elizabeth's Little Black Husband.—Croydon colliers.—John Ruskin.—By the Parish Pump.—John Gilpin.

Croydon is best reached by rail. It cannot be called a convenient centre, for one returns to centres, and Croydon has little that would recall a traveller. But it is an easy point of departure either for the country east, by Addington and the Kentish border, or south through Sanderstead to Coulsdon and Chaldon, or west by Beddington and the Carshalton trout ponds to Epsom. You may walk in any direction, except perhaps north, where you will walk into North Croydon. But in Croydon itself there are still two or three things worth seeing.

One is the Archbishop's Palace. An Archbishop's Palace is the very last building which would naturally associate itself with the Croydon tram lines and Croydon up-to-dateness, and it is the last building with which Croydon appears to wish to associate itself. The Palace stands apart from the bustle of the place, unhonoured, unhappy and ignored. Since the last Archbishop left it in the reign of George II it has served its turn as business premises for a bleacher and a calico-printer; it has been a wash-house, and is now a girls' school. One thing it has never been—of sufficient interest to Croydon to be rescued from sacrilege and neglect, and to take the place which is its due among historic national possessions. Perhaps one should be thankful that the palace of Cranmer, Whitgift and Laud is to-day in no rougher hands than the gentle Sisterhood of a children's day-school.

If Croydon Palace were rightly restored, how fine a relic it might be! The great banqueting-hall, with its noble roof of Spanish chestnut, which has even survived the steam and chemistry of a bleacher's vats; the long, panelled gallery where tradition has set Queen Elizabeth dancing; the guard chamber, perhaps built by Archbishop Arundell, who burnt the Lollards; the chapel with its oak stalls, its poppy-head carvings, and the gallery added by the archbishop who stood by Charles the First on the scaffold; if the oak were cleaned and the paint taken from the panels, and if under the mellow brick walls there were set out lawns and flowers; then Croydon might justly boast of its tram lines, its admirable sanitation, and its new Town Hall. It would possess something else.

When Queen Elizabeth lay at Croydon Palace, it was not an easy matter to find room for her train of courtiers. She came in July, 1573, to visit Archbishop Parker, and wished to come again in the following May, with a larger train than before. The steward, entrusted with the task of finding more room where there had never been enough, was in despair, and made out his list of lodgings for the archbishop, or, perhaps, the Queen's chamberlain, to see. The Lord Treasurer was to be "wher he was"; the Lord Admiral "at y^e nether end of the great chamber"; the "maydes of honnor wher they wer"; the "La Stafforde wher she was"; the "gentylmen husshers ther olde" lodging; and so on with a very long list. But the letter ends in a hopeless puzzle:—

Of the great archbishops few, strangely enough, have left memorials behind them at Croydon. Whitgift, Grindal, and Sheldon have their monuments in the church; of the others, Juxon added some carving to the Palace Chapel. Whitgift was the great Croydon archbishop, and did for Croydon what Abbot did for Guildford. He founded a hospital, and endowed a school.

Whitgift's Hospital stands to-day almost as its founder left it. His initials, I.W., worked in patterned brick into a gable, and the motto he chose for the doorway, "Qui dat pauperi nunquam indigebit," face a roaring thoroughfare and flaring shops, but inside the oak doors little can have changed. Weatherbeaten red-brick, mullioned windows looking out over flowers and shaven lawns, tiled roofs and tall chimneys make up a picture of solid goodness which fits well with the archbishop's memory. The chapel stands open, a dark, simple little place. The oak benches are the same on which the first pensioners sat, and down upon them look curious faded pictures, dingy in black and gold. One is a fine portrait of the founder at his writing-table, with his seal, his sandbox, a bell, quill pens and a compass (or is it a watch?). Before him lies an open Latin Bible, and he points to his favourite text—Cast thy bread upon the waters. On another wall hangs a framed poem in manuscript, some forty or fifty lines of extravagance in which the archbishop is compared in turn to a straight sound cedar, a lost gem, a pearl, and a "fairest knotlesse Plant," whose death forces the poet to

"Wish, that with a Sea of teares, my Verse
Could make an Island of thy honour'd Herse."

Another poet writes a prodigious Latin elegy "containing the briefest summary of the miseries and calamities of the human race." A painter adds a picture of Death digging a grave.

Whitgift's School is an old foundation in a modern building, and has added a record to cricket history. Mr. V.F.S. Crawford, one of the hardest hitters of his day, was a Whitgift boy, and has done remarkable batting as a schoolboy and since. But his most remarkable innings was played at Cane Hill, when he scored 180 out of 215 made while he was in, and reached his first 100 in nineteen minutes.

That the school buildings should be modern is inevitable, for the school outgrew itself forty years ago. But the school house which Whitgift built was pulled down in consequence—an act which doubtless sits lightly enough on Croydon's conscience. Four years ago the Hospital nearly followed the school, the argument being that there was insufficient room for the tram-lines.

Croydon church, like nothing else in the town, became modern by accident. It was burnt down in 1867, and Sir Gilbert Scott rebuilt it into the finest church, perhaps, in the county, next to St. Mary's, Southwark. In the fire the tombs of the archbishops almost disappeared. Grindal's is no longer to be seen, though possibly some tumbled stones collected into odd corners may be part of it. Sheldon's is a pile of fragments, heaped together behind a railing, charred and broken, hideous with the sculptured skulls, bones, worms, and winged hour-glasses with which our ancestors grimly decked their graves. Whitgift's monument has been restored and is a striking example of rich and intricate decoration, even if the pomp and colour of it are too garish for a tomb.

One looks at the stern, quiet features of his effigy and wonders what was the truth about the man. Was he what Macaulay has called him—"a narrow-minded, mean, and tyrannical priest, who gained power by servility and adulation, and employed it in persecuting those who agreed with Calvin about Church Government, and those who differed from Calvin touching the doctrine of Reprobation." Could he ever have been rightly described—Macaulay so describes the Master of Trinity who was to be Bishop of Worcester and Archbishop of Canterbury—as "in a chrysalis state, putting off the worm and putting on the dragon-fly, a kind of intermediate grub between sycophant and oppressor"? Perhaps Macaulay was naturally unlikely to judge him well. A portrait drawn by one who lived nearer his day is Izaak Walton—another, perhaps a gentler, I.W.:—

Walton thought him a very tactful prelate. He managed Queen Elizabeth admirably, and "by justifiable sacred insinuations, such as St. Paul to Agrippa—'Agrippa, believest thou? I know thou believest,' he wrought himself into so great a degree of favour with her, as, by his pious use of it, hath got both of them a great degree of fame in this world, and of glory in that into which they are now both entered." Queen Elizabeth was devoted to him, and nicknamed him "her little black husband." Without a licence from her little black husband she would not touch flesh in Lent.

The archbishops left Croydon, in 1758, when Archbishop Hutton died. The line of archbishop tenants of the Palace had been broken in the days of the Commonwealth, when Sir William Brereton, one of the Parliamentary Major-Generals, lived there. He was a soldier of conviction, and was nearly torn in pieces by the mob at Chester, "for ordering a drum to be beat for the parliament." Croydon's historian, Steinman, quotes from a pamphlet of Cavalier days, The Mystery of the Old Cause briefly unfolded, a quaint appreciation of him. He was "a notable man at a thanksgiving dinner, having terrible long teeth, and a prodigious stomach, to turn the archbishop's palace at Croydon into a kitchen, also to swallow up that palace and lands at a morsel." Brereton, as a reward for his military services, had been given several sequestrated properties, a chief forestership, and a seneschalship.

Four hundred years ago, Croydon was the centre of a great Surrey industry. The Croydon colliers were proverbial. They supplied London with coal, that is, charcoal, before the days of "sea-coal," the coal which blackens London smoke to-day. Then it reached London by sea. One Grimes, or Grimme, the greatest of the Croydon colliers, who lived in the reign of Edward VI, was actually sued by an archbishop for creating a nuisance with his smoke. The collier won. He was sufficiently celebrated to become the hero of two sixteenth-century plays, one of which bears his name, Grim, the Collier of Croydon. To be "as black as a Croydon collier," was to be as black as a sweep; and "a right Croydon sanguine" was a deep red-brown.

Once Croydon, always Croydon. The first railway line built in the country and sanctioned by Parliament ran from Croydon to Wandsworth. It was part of an original scheme proposed in 1799 for linking up London with Portsmouth by an iron railroad running through Croydon, Reigate, and Arundel. But it was thought best to begin with the part which ran from Croydon to Wandsworth, and perhaps it was as well that the scheme went no further, for it cost £35,000, and was a complete failure. The shareholders lost every penny. One feels it ought to have succeeded. The carriages or trucks were drawn by horses, and the wheels ran along grooved iron rails. Anybody who had a cart which fitted might put it on the rails and let his horse pull it along, if he paid the tolls, which were not heavy. However, its life was short. The Croydon canal, opened in 1809, robbed it of much of its heavy goods traffic, and the London and Brighton railway demolished it altogether. This is how "Felix Summerley" (his real name was Sir Henry Cole, and he liked a good walk with a good dinner at the end of it) described the change in his Pleasure Excursions in 1846.

Felix Summerley must be suspected of admiring the change. One who knew old Croydon well, and admired its changes less, was John Ruskin, who had relations there and visited them as a boy. Of one he writes in PrÆterita:—

Of his aunt at Croydon he has a pleasant memory:—

The Old King's Head and the fashionablest house in Market Street have gone. So has much else that Ruskin would have recognised. To guess at what his Croydon was like you may open Steinman's History at a little engraving of Whitgift's Hospital, from a drawing made at the cross-roads. The Hospital stands as it is to-day. Opposite it, a square, two-storied inn stretches over the road a fine carved bracket with a bunch of grapes in iron, proclaiming that here are post horses to be had from Nich: Jayne. A tall-hatted rustic pensively wheels a barrow in the middle of the road opposite the inn; a group of villagers in stout boots, smocks and stockings stands at the street corner; and, precisely on the spot where to-day's tram-lines swing north and west, a lazy-looking person in a straw hat, perhaps a sailor ashore, leans against a post within a yard or two of an imposing parish pump.

Croydon tradition claims John Gilpin. He is said to have lived in a farmhouse, which Croydon pulled down in 1897. It was known as Collier's Water Farm, and stood near what is now Thornton Heath Railway Station. Undoubtedly a John Gilpin lived there; but the author of the local guide-book who asserts that he was Cowper's original refers all inquirers to Dr. Brewer for corroboration; and that admirable sage informs me that Gilpin was Mr. Beyer, an eminent linendraper of Paternoster Row.