to be in a very ruinous condition." On April 18, 1740, an order was given for the church to be inspected. On the 19th it was inspected, and the steeple was reported to be very unsafe. On the 20th, therefore, which was Sunday, service was performed for the last time. On the 23rd the steeple fell in and took the roof with it; the workmen had left the church a few minutes before. Even then there was at least one untroubled soul in Guildford. The verger was told that the steeple had fallen. "That cannot be," he replied, "I have the key in my pocket."
The vault in which the archbishop lies was accidentally opened in 1888, when the church was being repaired, and some brickwork fell away. Through the gap, it is said, the coffin could be seen on the floor; the form of the body was distinct, and the beard was still there. The vault was sealed again; it had been unopened for more than two hundred and fifty years. It was during these alterations that the cenotaph standing over the vault was removed further east to where it now stands. It is a typical piece of Renaissance work, florid, intricate, insistent on the ghastliness of death. The effigy of the archbishop, stern and noble, lies on its marble bed supported by stacks of gilt-clasped books; underneath, a grating reveals a medley of human bones, carved with the minutest detail. The artist evidently enjoyed the work. But it is better worth looking at, for all that, than the monument on the other side of the church, where the recumbent form of Sir Arthur Onslow is apparently giving vague directions to an imaginary audience. Wrapped in a Roman toga, he waves a sleeveless right arm; his left is propped by a set of Journals of the House of Commons. It is a relief to pass beyond such tawdry pomposities into the solemn little chapel, sacred to one of the great regiments of the Army, the Queen's, the old Second of the Line. Their badge, the Lamb and Flag, and their name they get from Katherine of Braganza, Charles the Second's queen. Later, as Kirke's Lambs, they added to a dreadful fame at Sedgmoor; but rebellion breeds brutality, and Kirke was probably no more ferocious than others who have had to deal with insurgents. Since Sedgmoor, the Queen's, or to give them their other and less distinctive name, the Royal West Surrey Regiment, have served in practically every important campaign in which the Army has been engaged. Their tattered banners, with the broken, proud inscriptions of campaigns and battles, droop above long lists of dead.
Of the two other great Guildford churches, the lower, or Church of St. Nicholas, stands at the bottom of the High Street on the far side of the Wey. Probably it is the fourth church that has stood on this site; there are at all events, records of three previous demolitions, though each demolition has left one feature standing—the Loseley Chapel, belonging to the Mores of Loseley Park. With the exception of this chapel, with its brasses and monuments, dating back to the fourteenth century memorial of Arnold Brocas of Beaurepaire (surely a name of names!), the church is chiefly interesting as being a really satisfying piece of modern architecture. It was built in 1875, and, though the interior, with its modern glass and high colouring, has none of the quiet of age, it dulls to the right tone at dusk.
The Middle Church, St. Mary's, is the most interesting of the three. The tower was built before the Conquest, possibly originally for defence: at all events, there are two windows looking north and south which are doubly splayed, after Saxon fashion, a good deal above the ground level. The rest of the church has been built at different times, beginning with the chancel, which is pure Norman, and there are actually three levels to the floor, which gives rather an odd effect. The proportions of the church have been spoiled by the cutting off of the apse of the chancel—an entirely unwarrantable piece of destruction. The history of the mutilation is characteristic of the days of the Regency. George, Prince of Wales, used to drive down to Brighton, and perhaps his coach stuck in Quarry Street, which must have been horribly narrow, between the apse of St. Mary's and the town gaol opposite. He swore as a Georgian prince should, offered the town a good round sum to have the street widened, and the Corporation, who could have sliced something off the gaol and harmed nobody, preferred to cut at the church. They never got a penny of George's money.
But the most interesting feature of St. Mary's is the group of wall-paintings in the chapel of St. John, north of the nave. These are second in importance only to the famous painting at Chaldon, and have been admirably explained by Mr. J.G. Waller, writing in the Surrey Archæological Collections. They belong to that curious age when paintings on church walls were used as texts and preached from on Sundays, to be scratched and whitewashed out of recognition in later years by destroyers and "restorers" alike. The subjects chosen by the painter in St. Mary's Church are peculiar and strangely grouped. The centre of the group is a "Majesty," the conventional representation of the second coming of Christ. The head of the Christ has its nimbus; that He is "in his glory" you can see by the mantle of royal purple, and "the holy angels with Him" are represented by two little cramped figures, set apart to make room for other drawings. Altogether there are six medallions besides the "Majesty," and there are also designs in the spandrils above the arch, but these are separate from the subjects of the medallions. The medallions, Mr. Waller explains, represent certain scenes in the lives of John the Baptist, and John the Evangelist, though only two of the stories depicted belong to the Bible. One of them, next to the "Majesty," shows the Evangelist seated in a caldron of boiling oil, in which he is being held by a hideous tormentor with a pitchfork, while a seated figure of Christ confers protection upon the Saint. In another medallion the Evangelist is seen raising to life the dead Drusiana, a lady of Ephesus who died just before the Apostle came to the city; he is also shown turning sticks and stones into gold and jewels, which he did in illustration of a sermon preached against riches. In a third medallion the Saint drinks harmlessly from a chalice of poison which has just killed two malefactors dead at his feet; and in a fourth the other John, the Baptist, is painted with a rope round his neck, dragged by an executioner before Herod. The executioner next beheads the saint, and evidently sees some terrible portent on doing so, for his hair stands on end, and his hand flies up in horror. The two other medallions are separate subjects. In one, a figure with a rope round his neck is dragged before Christ by demons; other demons, one red and one white, scream and hold out threatening claws; perhaps their question is "Art Thou come hitherto torment us before the time?" The other subject is obscure. A Jew, apparently, is being baptised; and a deed with seals is being examined by another figure, over a stream of water and blood. Mr. Waller thinks that the reference is to a legend of a Jew who desecrated an image of Christ with a spear, in imitation of the story of the crucifixion, when out of the wound there gushed a stream of blood and water. This miracle converted the Jew and his friends, who immediately made over their synagogue to the Christian Church. That would explain the sealed deed.
Other paintings in the spandrils—pictures of Soul-weighing and Punishment—belong to other theologies. St. Michael holds the balance, and a demon tries to press down one of the scales so that the soul being weighed may kick the beam. But the subject of the painting is, of course, older than St. Michael. The doctrine that souls are weighed, and that devils and angels strive for the possession of them, is one of the oldest in the history of the world's religions. It finds a place in all the creeds; it belongs to Brahminism, to Buddhism, to Mahommedanism; it is identical with the Ritual of the Dead of Egyptian mythology, in which the souls of men are weighed before Osiris, and pray for mercy as they are weighed. As at Chaldon, in another part of the painting the condemned souls are being taken away. A demon carries them off, tied up in a bundle, to the fires of hell. Doubtless the Guildford congregations, listening Sunday after Sunday to the exposition of such potent texts, came to have little taste for theology that was not served up hot and strong.
Guildford has had other teachers besides theologians. The school, a grey, venerable building, which fronts on the High Street above Trinity Church, is the oldest in the county. It was founded in 1509, by one Robert Beckingham, a rich London grocer, who owned property in Guildford. But his benefactions did not permit any great latitude in building, and it was not until Edward VI had given the school a charter and a grant, and other great Guildford men had provided funds for building and endowment, that the school, nearly at the end of the sixteenth century, found itself in full working order. Since then it has educated some famous scholars. Guildford's greatest man, George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury; his brother, Robert Abbot, Bishop of Salisbury; another brother, Sir Maurice Abbot, Lord Mayor of London; John Parkhurst, Bishop of Norwich; Henry Cotton, Bishop of Norwich,