Charlton House

Last Friday, at the end of S's final half-term break in England, we travelled to one of Greenwich's lesser known attractions.

Built between 1607-1612 on the orders of King James I for Sir Adam Newton, Charlton House is a fine example of a Jacobean country house. The draw for us, however, was not the architecture or the relative absence of people, but the place of Charlton House in two notable scenes in the life and autobiography of Lady Anne (Murray) Halkett.

The "oldest" Mulberry tree in England

As at Dunfermline, we found that our lady’s reputation preceded us, which made for another interesting experience in oral history: This time we were treated to two different highly-romanticized accounts of Anne Murray’s clandestine engagement with a love-struck Thomas Howard. (More on the less-romanticized version in scene 1 below.)

Anne's father, Sir Thomas Murray, may have known Sir Adam Newton well because both men came to England from Scotland with King James, and served in the royal courts as tutors to the king’s two sons, Henry and Charles.

Original Chapel Door

We don’t know anything more about the relationship between the Murray and Newton families, but in 1640 Sir Adam’s son Henry Newton married Sir Thomas’s daughter and Anne’s sister, Elizabeth. By this time, Sir Thomas (d. 1623) and Sir Adam (d. 1630) were long gone, and the English civil war was on the horizon.

Scene 1: Blind Date in the Cellars

Fast forward to 1644 and the setting of our scene 1: King Charles has retreated to Oxford; Anne’s brother-in-law, Henry Newton, is in hiding for supporting the Royalist cause; and twenty-two-year-old Anne, her sister, Elizabeth, and their mother, Jane Murray, are living together at Charlton House. They are joined by Anne Murray’s good friend, Anne Howard, daughter of Baron Edward Howard of Escrick, a Parliamentarian who was instrumental in helping the Murray women get permission to keep living at Charlton House after the Newton property had been claimed by Parliament.

Long Hall Fireplace

To make a long story short, Baron Howard’s son, Thomas, falls in love with Anne, proposes, is rebuffed, threatens to convert to Catholicism and join a monastery, which arouses Anne’s sympathy. Anne eventually promises not to marry anyone before Thomas does. Thomas takes Anne’s “maybe” as a “yes,” but when Anne’s mother hears about it she is NOT PLEASED, apparently because Anne was not well enough off to make a good match for the son of her benefactor. Anne’s mother threatens to cut off all ties with Anne if ever she sets eyes on Thomas again. Not to be deterred, Thomas makes a final visit to Charlton house before sailing to France. He is mistaken for Henry Newton, beaten and left unconscious, which again arouses Anne’s sympathy. She agrees to meet Thomas—not in the summer house, as he proposed ...

Inigo Jones designed Summer House, until recently re-purposed as a public toilet

... but in the cellars. And, to keep her word to her mother, she insists on meeting him blindfolded. (For more detail, see pp. 3-19 in Anne Halkett’s autobiography.)

In the summer of 1646, two years after Thomas professed his undying love, Anne is again at Charlton House when she learns that Thomas has married someone else.

Since Anne was concerned about the summer house’s proximity to her mother’s rooms, we speculated that they were located on the second floor, below the long hall:

The Long Hall, rebuilt after the north side of the house was damaged by a bomb in WWII

Because the north wing of the second floor is now used as offices, we didn't get to view its rooms, but the staff at Charlton House kindly offered to let us see the cellars:

Scene 2: A Wedding “in my brother Newton’s Closet”

Original Staircase

Anne Murray’s friendship with Anne Howard apparently suffered little from the one Anne’s engagement to the other Anne’s brother. Anne Howard invited Anne Murray to Naworth Castle in September 1649, where she stayed until June 1650. There she had another courtship experience, this time involving a scheming Anglican clergyman-in-exile who was chaplain to the Naworth household. (See pp. 31 and following in the Autobiography.)

In June 1650 Anne Murray went to Scotland, where she met and became engaged to a widower from Dunfermline by the name of Sir James Halkett. In September 1654, she returned to London to set her financial affairs in order so that she could get married. This took almost two years. The wedding finally took place on 2 March 1656, outside London in Charlton House. This is how Halkett described the event:

“Upon Satturday the first of March, 1655-6, Sr James and I wentt to Charleton, and tooke with us Mr. Gaile, who was chaplaine to the Countese of Devonshire, who preached (as hee some times used to doe) att the church the next day, and affter super hee maried us in my brother Newton’s closett, none knowing of itt in the family or beeing presentt butt my brother and sister and Mr. Neale.” (p. 137)

Salon Fireplace Carving

The reason the marriage took place at Charlton House is probably because Anne wanted to be married by a proper Anglican clergyman. Religious marriages were forbidden during the Interregnum, so getting Mr. Gaile would have involved a certain amount of string-pulling and privacy, as he could have gotten in trouble for performing marriages. Mr. Gaile was chaplain to Halkett’s godmother, the Countess of Devonshire, the façade of whose house we saw at Leicester. Halkett says that a sermon preached by Mr. Gaile at St. James Palace in 1644 was what first led her to make prayer for the king a special part of her daily devotional routine, so he seems to have been a significant figure for her.

Of course, we went looking for Henry Newton’s closet. I took a photo of the fireplace in the office now identified as the Newton Room:

Unfortunately, the interior rooms of the house have been changed since Halkett’s day:

And no one seems to know who slept where in the mid-17th century.

Charlton House from the East, with Ha-ha

Credits: As you can probably tell, some of the wording as well as much of the detail comes from our resident Halkett expert. The mistakes and over-simplifications are my own.

Our Accidental Coronation Day

On June 2, at the end of S.'s mid-term break, we made our way to Buckingham Palace with a workaround plan in place to catch part of the changing of the guard despite the inevitable large crowds, long waits, and poor views. When we arrived at Wellington Barracks we were surprised to find that something more grand than we expected was already happening:

We caught two or three marching bands like this one:

We then watched the cavalry line up in front of Buckingham Palace:

Eventually horse-drawn carriages emerged from the palace and everyone except the spectators and guards trooped off.

Since we had such a good view and the changing of the guard evidently had not occurred, we dutifully put in our time waiting for the real event. An hour or so later, we gave up and made our way to the other side of St. James's Park for our appointment at the Churchill War Rooms.

There we found the real action was happening--a magnificent spectacle--at the Horse Guard Parade grounds. All this, I now realize, was part of the Colonel's Review, held one week before the Queen's birthday celebration. Although as far as I know no members of the royal family were present for the rehearsal, June 2 was also the 65th anniversary of the queen's coronation.

I'm not sure whether to be annoyed at myself for not doing my homework in advance, or glad for the surprise--if we had known there was to be a major event we would almost certainly have canceled the trip to avoid the crowds. For her part, s. was terribly disappointed to miss the changing of the guard--which, it seems, never took place that day--but the variety of water fowl in St. James's park almost made up for it:

The Churchill War Rooms were worth seeing too.

London

London is a bagpiper playing AC/DC's Thunderstruck outside Westminster Abbey. (Sorry, no picture. I was trying to figure out how to get into the Abbey.)

Westminster Abbey is for those who don't mind long lines and lots of people. Once we were through security, we eventually discovered we could jump the entrance queue because we had purchased our tickets online the night before.

Inside, it helps to think of the edifice as a church and a church yard all under the same roof. There is a lot to take in, from the medieval building itself to the effigies of dead monarchs, and plaques memorializing other famous British notables. The audio guide, narrated by Jeremy Irons, helped us make sense of some of it, and--more important still--kept even our junior member moving through the building with interest. A highlight for s. was chancing upon the grave of Muzio Clementi, a composer her piano teacher had her read about. Like John Wesley, I was struck by Roubiliac's sculpture of Lady Elizabeth and Joseph Nightingale. I was also pleased to see a memorial to the historian brothers, Henry and Owen Chadwick. (No pictures because photographs are not permitted inside the Abbey.)

From the Abbey we made our way along St. James' Park to Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery.

A. wanted to see WhistleJacket:

 The best part of London, from s's perspective ...

... was seeing several new varieties of waterfowl in St. James' Park:

A supposedly fun thing we'll probably do again

We thought it would be a good idea to go to the Tower of London on the holiday weekend.

Thousands of other people had the same idea, and the place was packed, though perhaps not more than normal.

We did get a look at the crown jewels before the lines got too long (no pictures allowed), and we made our way through the suits of armour in the White Tower and wandered the ramparts.

Charles I's Armour

And then we left, feeling as though we didn't quite get our money's worth, even on a two-for-one deal.

s. thought the Tower Ravens were the best.

We will probably do something like this again--paying too much for an underwhelming visit to a major tourist attraction that has been dumbed down for the masses--but for now it is nice to be able to cross the Tower of London off our bucket list, and move on.

Fortunately, the outing picked up from there. After some coffee we left the crowds behind, and wandered through part of the core of old London.

The bombed-out ruins of St. Dunstan's Church

Our first goal in "The City" was the monument to the great fire of London:

And by that point we were close enough to St. Paul's Cathedral that we decided to press on despite protests from our junior member:

A double-decker bus ride got us back to Kings Cross in time to make a last-minute stop at the British Library to view their freely accessible Treasures of the British Library exhibit--easily the highlight of the trip. (No pictures allowed again, so you'll have to imagine priceless manuscripts, or click here for a virtual tour.)

The crown jewels are nice, but they don't compare to Codex Sinaiticus and the Magna Carta.

Highlights from the British Museum

We made it out to the British Museum last weekend, enjoying our first London Tube ride in situ along the way. S., along with a crowd of other people, was excited at the prospect of seeing the archaeological discovery that enabled scholars to decode Egyptian hieroglyphs:

The Rosetta Stone, British Museum,

After visiting Athens in 2013, I wanted to see the Elgin Marbles that used to adorn the Parthenon. (At the beginning of the 19th century, Lord Elgin received permission from the Ottoman government to take away "pieces of stone with old inscriptions or figures thereon." The priceless rock he carted off surely exceeded what the Sultan had in mind.)

The Egyptian exhibits were stunning, as one would expect:

Amenhotep III's left arm

But I was most surprised and astounded by the Assyrian artifacts. Here, for instance, is a Lamassu from Khorsabad that apparently goes back to the reign of Sargon II in the late 8th century BCE:

More exciting still is a series of wall panels depicting Sennacherib's siege of Lachish in 701 BCE:

Sennacherib's capture of Lachish is mentioned in Isaiah 36:1-2; it is also described first-hand in a series of letters inscribed on ostraca that were discovered when Lachish was excavated in the 1930's.

On a final dash through the second floor, I snapped pictures of various 1st-century Roman emperors for use in class:

The Emperor Augustus

If it were not for the incentive of seeing real mummies...

... we would have missed the Cyrus Cylinder, which describes Cyrus's policy of repatriating subject peoples to their homelands:

Admission is free, so it is churlish to complain that the museum is simply too large to take in on a single visit. The contents could easily be divided into a half-dozen world-class museums. 

I guess that means I'll need to go back.