The pageant of Parliament, vol. 1 of 2

CHAPTER VII
PALACE OF WESTMINSTER

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The Palace of Westminster, in which Lords and Commons meet—the largest and most imposing Gothic building in the world—may be regarded, rising so nobly on the left bank of the Thames, as an expression in architecture of the dignity and stability of Parliament, and the honour in which it is held by the Nation. Most visitors to the Palace reach it by Whitehall or Victoria Street. On that side are the entrances to both Houses. It is more picturesque, but less imposing, than the river front. The inclusion of Westminster Hall—the only overground portion of the old Palace saved from the fire of 1834—enforced the breaking up of the western or land front of the new Palace into a variety of façades. The light and shade produced by the massive grey masonry of the ancient Hall, mingling with the Gothic gracefulness of the new Palace, is very beautiful, and also pregnant with historic meaning. It reminds one of the survival of tradition in the forms and ceremonies of Parliament. The effect of this blending of the past and present is heightened by the close contiguity of the venerable Abbey, and the open grassy space, known as Parliament Square, with its effigies of great Victorian statesmen—Sir Robert Peel, Lord Palmerston, the Earl of Derby, and Lord Beaconsfield—which front the forecourt of the Palace; and the striking figure of Oliver Cromwell, with sword and Bible, on the sunken grass plot by the side of Westminster Hall. To the contemplative mind the long history of government and administration is presented—its struggles, its controversies, its failures, its successes.

But the most impressive view of the Palace to the eye is obtained from the opposite bank of the Thames. Standing beneath the aged and hoary Lambeth Palace on the Surrey side—town house of the Archbishop of Canterbury—and looking across the river, especially when the mighty waterway is at its full tide, one realizes more completely the Gothic stateliness of this temple of legislation, the outcome of the constructive genius of Sir Charles Barry, and the graceful fancy of Augustus Welby Pugin. The long façade above the river wall and terrace, its uniform symmetry, the lightness and grace of its stone carving, the many steeples and pinnacles—beginning with the delicate tracery of the lofty Clock Tower, close to Westminster Bridge, and terminating with the solid massiveness of the colossal Victoria Tower—form altogether a most imposing masterpiece in architecture, worthy of the ancient and august National Assembly which deliberates within its walls, that mother of representative institutions which perhaps is the greatest gift of the English race to mankind. So it is that something of the secret of the high place which Parliament holds in popular esteem and pride may be found in the grandeur of its home. At any rate, the spectacle presented by the Palace of Westminster does impress the mind with the glory of the purpose of Parliament and its might. Here we see the apotheosis of politics, the science of the progress and well-being of humanity, and the temple in which it is fittingly served.

Thus at Westminster we have not only the flower or the fruit of the national life in the guidance of the State aright, but its roots and fibres going deep down to the very bedrock of the past. For more than six centuries the grand inquest of the Nation has sat at Westminster. At first it was a council of the great and wise summoned by the King personally. When Edward I, “the great law-giver,” sent to the sheriffs writs for the election of two knights for each shire, two citizens for each city, two burgesses for each borough, in addition to himself calling together the prelates and the nobles, the principle of popular election came into operation. The Parliament thus elected and known as the “Model Parliament” was really representative of the Nation at large. It met in the Palace of Westminster so long ago as November, 1295. For over a century the three estates of the realm—the Prelates, the Nobles, and the Commons—deliberated together. The division of Parliament into two Houses—one for the Peers, spiritual and temporal, and the other for the Commons—took place in 1377, the last year of the reign of Edward III. The Lords have always met in the Palace of Westminster. The Commons for the best part of two centuries assembled in the Chapter House, or the Refectory, of Westminster Abbey. They held their last sitting there on the day that Henry VIII died.

Henry’s son and successor, Edward VI, gave St. Stephen’s Chapel—within the Palace of Westminster—to the Commons for their meeting place in 1547, the first year of his reign, and there the representatives of the people regularly met and deliberated until the place was destroyed by fire in 1834. This Chapel, built by Edward III in 1327, the first year of his reign, on the ruins of the original St. Stephen’s Chapel (which was provided by King Stephen in 1147 for the use of the inhabitants of the Palace, and dedicated by him to the first Christian martyr) was in the beautiful Gothic of the period, and Italian artists were brought to London to adorn its walls with religious frescoes. After the Reformation, when the Chapel was transferred from the Crown to the House of Commons, these mural paintings were covered over with a plain, decorous wainscot, which in the gay times of Charles II was in turn hidden behind rich tapestry hangings. These tapestries disappeared in the alterations made by Sir Christopher Wren in 1707, after the Union of England and Scotland, so as to provide accommodation for the forty-five Members from Scotland. The Chamber underwent a final transformation in 1800, when, as a result of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland, seats for 100 additional Members had to be found. The old wainscot was then taken down; and although the paintings of the Italian artists of the fourteenth century were found to be in a perfect state of preservation, they were demolished likewise to make room for the required two extra lines of benches on each side. There were now five rows of benches on either side, divided, as in the present Chamber, by a gangway. The Speaker’s Chair was at the top of the Chamber, where the altar originally stood. It was a carved oak armchair, surmounted with the Royal Arms of England. Below it, as now, was the Clerk’s table.

The old House of Lords, like the old House of Commons, was an oblong chamber with rows of benches on each side running up from the floor to the walls. On the walls hung tapestries, divided into compartments by oak frames, illustrating scenes from the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and with medallion portraits of the principal English naval captains woven in the borders. They were the gifts of the States of Holland to Queen Elizabeth in commemoration of England’s great deliverance and the ruined dream of Spain. The Throne on which all the Sovereigns of England from 1550 to 1834—from Edward VI to William IV—sat on the assembling of Parliament was at the top of the Chamber. It was a carved gilt armchair standing on a dais. The seat was lined with crimson velvet. Two gilt Corinthian pillars supported a canopy, also of crimson velvet, and the whole was surmounted by a crown.

Between the two Houses lay the Painted Chamber, a survival of the original Palace, erected by Edward the Confessor, who indeed used this particular room as a sleeping apartment and died in it. Its walls were painted with battle scenes by direction of Henry III in the middle of the thirteenth century, and hence its name. Here the Court, before which Charles I was arraigned, sat for the concluding days of the trial. Here Oliver Cromwell and Henry Martin blacked each other’s faces in fun, like giddy young schoolboys, as they signed the warrant which condemned the King to the headsman’s axe. The Chamber was also used for conferences between representatives of both Houses when they differed in regard to a Bill. At these meetings the Peers were seated and wore their hats, while the Commons had humbly to stand uncovered.

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Thus the old Palace of Westminster was historically of great interest. But it had no pretensions to beauty. It was just an architectural patchwork, added to from time to time without any sense of order or unity of design. Interiorily, it was also confined and uncommodious. Yet the idea of pulling it down to give place to a building of nobler proportions and one more suitable to its great purpose was not relished. In the very last session of the Commons that was held in St. Stephen’s Chapel Joseph Hume proposed that new Houses of Parliament should be built in the Green Park. The motion was rejected. Four or five months later, as the buildings were enveloped in flames, one of the spectators wittily cried out: “There is Joe Hume’s motion being carried without a division.”

The great conflagration which destroyed the Palace was on the night of Thursday, October 16, 1834. The Whig Ministry, under Earl Grey, that carried the Reform Act of 1832, broke up in July on the question of appropriating a portion of the revenues of the Church in Ireland to secular purposes, and was succeeded by another Whig Administration with Lord Melbourne as Prime Minister. Parliament was prorogued on August 15th by King William IV in person. It was to meet again on October 23rd. When that day came the ancient Palace of Westminster was a thing of the past. At first it was thought the fire was the work of political incendiaries. But a Committee of the Privy Council found, after a long and searching investigation, that it was due solely to human stupidity. An immense quantity of old wooden “tallies” or notched sticks, originally used as receipts for sums paid into the Exchequer, had accumulated at Westminster, and, after the abolition of this barbaric mode of keeping the national accounts and the substitution of pens, ink and paper, in 1826, the sticks were used as firewood in the Government offices. As the room in which the remaining “tallies” were stored at Westminster was required for another purpose, two men were employed all day, on October 16, 1834, in getting rid of the sticks by burning them in the stove under the House of Lords by which that Chamber was heated. At five o’clock they went home. At half-past six the House of Lords was found to be on fire. The heat from the over-charged flues had ignited the panelling of the Chamber. The progress of the flames could not be stayed, and gradually the conflagration swept over the whole mass of buildings. Thus did the ancient Palace of Westminster disappear through an act of almost incredible carelessness. All that remained of the historic fabric were the cloisters of the old St. Stephen’s Chapel (or House of Commons), the crypt beneath the Chapel, in which the Speaker used to entertain Members at dinners and other social functions, and, happily, Westminster Hall, with its centuried associations of great men and historic deeds. Practically everything else was destroyed, including the Throne in the House of Lords and the Chair in the House of Commons.

On October 23, 1834, the day appointed for the reassembling of Parliament, the two Houses met for a brief and formal sitting amid acres of still smouldering ruins, the Lords within the charred walls of their library, and the Commons in an adjoining committee-room. It was decided temporarily to fit up the House of Lords for the use of the Commons, and the Painted Chamber for the use of the Lords, and a sum of £30,000 was voted for the purpose. A Royal Commission was also appointed to superintend the construction of a new Palace of Westminster. Parliament then adjourned. On November 14th King William dismissed the Melbourne Ministry, and Sir Robert Peel was commanded to form a new Administration. On the advice of the Prime Minister, the King dissolved Parliament on December 29th, and the new Parliament met on February 19, 1835, in the temporary buildings, which continued to be used till the completion of the present Palace of Westminster.

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Among the immense crowd which witnessed the grand and terrible spectacle of the burning of the old Houses of Parliament on that night in October 1834 was an architect named Charles Barry. He had known and loved the ancient and historic pile from his earliest years, for, born in 1795, the son of a stationer who had a shop in Bridge Street, opposite the Houses of Parliament, he had grown to manhood under its very shadow. Parliament decided to have an open competition for designs of the new legislative buildings. The only condition imposed was that the style should be either Gothic or Elizabethan. As many as ninety-seven architects entered the lists. The successful competitor was Barry for his Gothic plan. He was forty years old at the time. In superintending the building and internal decoration of the Palace—subject to the control of the Royal Commission—Barry was assisted by Augustus Welby Pugin, another architect and an authority on the Gothic style. Hume’s idea of removing the Houses of Parliament to the Green Park was revived, but the historic associations of Westminster made too great an appeal. Moreover, was not the Duke of Wellington of opinion—far-seeing man that he was—that the site by the river was the best, as it would be fool-hardy to have the Houses of Parliament accessible on all sides to an attacking mob?

The river wall was begun in 1837. The buildings were not commenced until three years later. The selection of the stone received the anxious consideration of the Commissioners. Finally the hard magnesian limestone from Anston, in Yorkshire, was selected for the exterior of the buildings, and French Caen stone for the interior. Then, on April 27, 1840, the first stone—it may be seen from Westminster Bridge in the south-east angle of the plinth of the Speaker’s House—was laid without any public ceremony by the wife of the architect, and the vast edifice was raised on a bed of concrete, 12 feet thick. Exactly seven years later—April 15, 1847—the Lords first occupied their House; and at the opening of the session of 1852, on November 4th, the Commons assembled in their new Chamber.

The progress of the building was beset with many difficulties and vexations for the designer. The Palace was originally expected to be finished in six years, at a cost of £800,000, exclusive of furniture and fittings. Twenty years passed before it was fully completed, and over £2,000,000 was expended upon it. The Treasury refused to pay Barry an architect’s professional fees of 5 per cent. upon the outlay on the works executed under his direction, and fixed his remuneration at £25,000, or £23,000 less than he held he was entitled to. His designs were also subjected to continuous criticism and attack by other architects. However, he was knighted on the completion of his splendid work. Dying suddenly at Clapham Common on May 12, 1860, his remains were honoured by a grave in Westminster Abbey. His statue by John Henry Foley stands at the foot of the great staircase leading to the committee-rooms of the Houses of Parliament.

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Probably no feature of London is so familiar in the metropolis, or so widely known by name in the provinces, as the famous clock of the Houses of Parliament. No visitor to London would think of returning home without having seen “Big Ben” and heard him chiming the quarters and booming out the hour. During the summer season hundreds of thousands of strangers, not only from the provinces, but from far-off lands, gaze up at his massive, honest face, proud and delighted to have made the acquaintance of so great a London celebrity. It is the largest clock in the world. Each of the four dials, there being one for each point of the compass, is of white enamelled glass and 23 feet in diameter. The minute marks on the dial look as if they were close together. They are 14 inches apart. The numerals are two feet long. The minute hand is 14 feet, and the hour hand six feet. To wind the clock takes about five hours. The time is regulated by electric communication with Greenwich Observatory.

The clock has a large bell to toll the hours and four smaller ones to chime the quarters. The large bell is called “Big Ben,” after Sir Benjamin Hall, who was First Commissioner of Works when the Clock Tower was erected. It weighs 13½ tons. Twenty men could stand under it. For a clapper it has a piece of iron 2 feet long, 12 inches in diameter, and weighing 12 cwt. No wonder, then, that there are few things more impressive than “Big Ben” tolling the hour of twelve, in his slow, measured and solemn tones, especially at midnight, when the roar of London is hushed in slumber. And what is said by the full chime of bells before the striking of each hour? Here is the verse, simple and beautiful, to which the chime—a run of notes from the accompaniment to “I know that my Redeemer liveth” in Handel’s Messiah—is set:

During the session of Parliament a brilliant steady light, blazing from a lantern over “Big Ben,” may be seen at night from most parts of London. It indicates that the House of Commons is sitting. So long as the representatives of the people are in conclave, the light flashes its white flame through the darkness. It vanishes the moment the House rises. A wire runs from the lantern down to a room under the floor of the House of Commons, and when the question, “That this House do now adjourn” is agreed to, a man stationed below pulls a switch, which instantly extinguishes the light. When this beacon was first set on high, and for many years after, it shone only towards the west, for it was thought unlikely than an M.P. would dwell in, or even visit, any other quarter of the town. But with the extension of the franchise Parliament became democratized, and a new lantern was provided which sheds its beams in the direction of Peckham as well as of Pall Mall. The light should be regarded by all who see it as a sacred symbol of the fire of liberty, law and justice ever burning in the House of Commons. Another comparatively recent innovation is the flying of the Union Jack from the iron flagstaff, 64 feet high, which tops the 336 feet of the Victoria Tower, on days that Parliament is sitting. Only the Royal Standard was seen, before that, on the rare occasions that Queen Victoria came to open Parliament in person. Small as the Union Jack seems to the upturned gaze of persons in the streets, it is of remarkable dimensions, being 60 feet long and 45 feet wide. I saw one day the flag of another country flying for the first time side by side with the Union Jack over the Victoria Tower. It was the Stars and Stripes. The day was April 20, 1917—the day on which the United States joined France, Italy and England in the War against Germany.

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The Palace of Westminster covers an area of nine acres. Eleven courts or quadrangles give light and air to its 1,200 or 1,300 rooms, its hundred staircases, and its two miles of corridors. In the very heart of the Palace is the great Central Hall, above which rises a tower terminating in a spire, and right and left of the Hall are the two Houses of Parliament—the Commons’ Chamber nearer to the Clock Tower, the Lords’ Chamber nearer to the Victoria Tower—while about them lie the retiring rooms of their respective Members and the homes of their principal officers. There, used to be twenty official residences in the Palace. They have been considerably reduced in order to provide more accommodation for Members. Still, on the Commons side, the Speaker, the Clerk and the Sergeant-at-Arms are commodiously housed. In the old Palace a Minister had no escape from the House of Commons except the Library or smoking-room, which were available to all Members, and one gathers from the published recollections of old parliamentarians that it was not seemly for a Cabinet Minister to be seen there. “The place for a Minister,” it used to be said, “if at the House, is in the House.” In the new Palace every Minister has a private room in the corridors at the back of the Speaker’s Chair, in which he may transact departmental business and receive visitors, when his presence in the House is not particularly required.

The principal entrance to the Palace of Westminster is by St. Stephen’s Porch, in Old Palace Yard. Immediately to the left extends the wonderful and impressive Westminster Hall, the thrilling associations of which must quicken the pulses of the least imaginative. Straight ahead lies St. Stephen’s Hall, leading to the Central Hall of the Houses of Parliament. This noble hall is traversed daily, during the session, by thousands of the public on their way to or from the Legislative Chambers. How many pay heed to its strange vicissitudes? It occupies the site of old St. Stephen’s Chapel (originally the Chapel Royal of the ancient Palace of Westminster), in which, as I have said, the Commons sat regularly from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. In the building of the new Palace, St. Stephen’s Hall was raised on the vaulted foundations of St. Stephen’s Chapel. The positions of the Speaker’s Chair and the Table are marked by brass plates set in the floor of St. Stephen’s Hall. Here it was that one of the most historic of parliamentary incidents took place. On this very spot stood Charles I and Mr. Speaker Lenthal when the King demanded whether there were then present in the House the five Members, including Pym and Hampden, who had promoted the Grand Remonstrance against his unconstitutional action, and the Speaker made his famous reply: “I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place, but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am,” and when the angry cries of “Privilege, Privilege!” raised by Members were the presage of civil war. St. Stephen’s Hall fittingly contains statues of twelve of the greatest and wisest statesmen whose voices so often rang through the old House of Commons. The statesmen thus honoured are Selden, Hampden, Falkland, Clarendon, Somers, Walpole, Chatham, Mansfield, Burke, Fox, Pitt and Grattan; and the selection was made by the historians Macaulay and Hallam.

Beneath St. Stephen’s Hall is the old crypt of St. Stephen’s Chapel. Like the Chapel, it was originally used for religious services. For centuries after the Reformation it was used as a place for shooting rubbish. About a quarter of a century before the fire of 1834 it was converted into a dining-room in which the dinners given by the Speaker to Members took place. After the fire the crypt was restored to its original purpose, and for a time was a place of worship for the numerous residents within the area of the Palace of Westminster. It is the most beautiful place in the Palace, with its altar, inlaid marble floor, walls of mosaic and groined ceiling. It is also a place of solitude and silence. Not for years has it been used as a place of worship. The only sound to which it now re-echoes is the cry of the infant as the water of baptism is poured on its head. One of the few privileges of an M.P. is that a child born to him may be christened in St. Stephen’s Crypt.

A new Member is not many hours in the Palace of Westminster before he has secured the special peg for his hat and overcoat in the beautiful cloisters of old St. Stephen’s, which has been turned into a cloak-room for the Commons; obtained one of the long rows of lockers, or presses, in the corridors, immediately surrounding the Chamber, to which each Member is entitled, for storing books and papers; enjoyed a pipe or cigar in the smoking-room; had a meal in one of the several dining-rooms; read the newspapers in the news-room, or made himself acquainted with some of the contents of the extensive Library; strolled on the Terrace; had tea in the tea-room, and dispatched numbers of letters on the official stationery of the House to relatives and friends giving his first impressions of the scene where glory or obscurity awaits him as a representative of the people.

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One of the most pleasant adjuncts of the House of Commons is the large and lofty suite of rooms overlooking the Thames, which is devoted to the Library. But there is more in these apartments than books. They also contain some rare and most interesting historical relics, parliamentary and political. Here in a glass case is shown a manuscript volume, stained and mouldered, of the old Journals of the House of Commons. The writing on the pages that are open is not easily decipherable. But it is well worth while endeavouring to peruse it, for it is the official chronicle of the raid of Charles I on the House of Commons. The shaky handwriting tells of the agitation of the Clerk when he made the record.

In the Library is also to be seen a memento of a curious privilege enjoyed of old by Members of Parliament. This is a collection of envelopes franked by eminent Members of both Houses. It comprises about 10,000 signatures, and covers the period from 1784 to 1840, when franking was abolished. By the system of franking, Peers and Commons had the free delivery of letters posted by themselves and their friends. It was introduced in 1660 to relieve Members of some of the expenses incurred in the discharge of their national duties. But this freedom of the Post Office was not confined to letters. Household furniture and even a pack of hounds were sent free through the post by M.P.’s in England, and in Ireland an M.P. franked his wife and children from Galway to Dublin and back on a holiday trip. Members also signed packets of letters wholesale and gave them away to friends. One noble lord thereby franked the tidings of his own death. He died suddenly at his desk after addressing some covers to friends, and the family economically used the covers to tell those friends that he had passed away. Ultimately, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, the daily allowance to each Member of both Houses was limited to ten sent by himself and fifteen received by him. All such letters had to bear on their covers the signatures of those who franked them. In the House of Commons collection are to be seen the autographs of archbishops and bishops, of Peers and of Commoners, including such celebrities as Nelson, Byron, Canning, Fox, Peel, Palmerston, Wellington, Clive, Cobbett, Grattan, O’Connell and Gladstone. In the year 1837 as many as 7,400,000 franked letters were posted, at an estimated loss to the revenue of the Post Office of over £1,000,000. At the same time all sorts of devices had to be resorted to by the poor to evade the heavy postage, from 10d. to 1s. 6d., which was then charged for letters. Rowland Hill, the author of the penny postal system, used to underline words in newspapers which he sent home—a Whig politician’s name to indicate that he was well, and a Tory’s that he was ill. Franking was abolished in 1840, on the establishment of the penny post. Members, however, are still entitled to the privilege of sending free through the post a limited number of copies of a Bill to their constituents, by endorsing the covering wrapper with their signatures.

The table of the old House of Commons, which was designed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1706, and at which Burke, Pitt, Fox, Canning and Peel stood while addressing the House, was found in the ruins, after the fire of 1834, almost uninjured. It is now preserved in the tea-room. In one of the smoking-rooms is to be seen an interesting memorial of Henry Broadhurst, one of the first of the Labour members. In a glass case are the mallet and chisels used by him as a stonemason employed on the buildings of the new Palace of Westminster, which he was afterwards to enter, not only as a Member, but as a Minister, for he served as Under-Secretary of the Home Department in 1886.

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The old Houses of Parliament had no such pleasant lounge as the Terrace, which extends the whole length of the river front. On summer nights Members who desired a blow of fresh air promenaded old Westminster Bridge. “It was a beautiful, rosy, dead calm morning when we broke up a little before five to-day,” wrote Francis Jeffrey, M.P. and editor of the Edinburgh Review, to a friend on April 20, 1831, in reference to a late and stormy sitting over the first Reform Bill, “and I took three pensive turns along the solitude of Westminster Bridge, admiring the sharp clearness of St. Paul’s, and all the city spires soaring up in a cloudless sky, the orange-red light that was beginning to play on the trees of the Abbey and the old windows of the Speaker’s house, and the flat green mist of the river floating upon a few lazy hulks on the tide and moving low under the arches. It was a curious contrast with the long previous imprisonment in the stifling, roaring House, amid dying candles, and every sort of exhalation.” If Jeffrey could return from the Shades and see the Terrace, especially on a fine afternoon in June or July, when “five o’clock tea” is being served, how amazed he would be, and how he would curse his fate that he should have been born a century or so too soon! Perhaps? For there are legislators who think that “Tea on the Terrace” is a function lowering to the dignity of Parliament. A part of the Terrace is reserved for their sole use by a notice, “For Members Only,” where they may ruminate in gloomy aloofness undisturbed by the smiles of beauty and the rustle of her skirts.

As the new Member explores the corridors and rooms, he will see the walls hung with portraits of all the Prime Ministers, all the Speakers, and a long line of Chancellors of the Exchequer, besides those of other distinguished politicians who never attained to office. Apart from their innate interest as counterfeit presentments of great statesmen, in mezzotints or line engravings, these pictures should stimulate the ambition of the new Member to make a name for himself. There is one way in which the new Member may employ his leisure at Westminster with profit to the tax-payer. That is to follow the excellent example set by Passmore Edwards, the philanthropist, who sat in Parliament for a number of years in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Writing in his autobiography, A Few Footprints, he says:

“True political economy,” Edwards adds, “is in reality true moral economy. I hate waste anywhere and everywhere.”