they hacked up the monuments, and dug up the bones; they destroyed the Master’s house, and cut down the trees in his quiet orchard; they pulled down the Brothers’ houses round the little ancient square; they pulled down the row of Sisters’ houses and the Bedeswomen’s houses; they swept the people out of the Precinct, and destroyed the streets; they pulled down the Courts, Spiritual and Temporal, and opened the doors of the prison; they grubbed up the burying ground, and with the bones and the dust of the dead, and the rubbish of the foundations, they filled up the old reservoir of the Chelsea water-works, and enabled Mr.

Cubitt to build Eccleston Square.  When all was gone they let the water into the big hole they had made, and called it St. Katherine’s Dock.  All this done, they became aware of certain prickings of conscience.  They had utterly demolished and swept away and destroyed a thing which could never be replaced; they were fain to do something to appease those prickings.  They therefore stuck up a new chapel, which the architect called Gothic, with six neat houses in two rows, and a large house with a garden in Regent’s Park, and this they called St. Katherine’s, ‘Sirs,’ they said, ’it is not true that we have destroyed that ancient foundation at all; we have only removed it to another place.  Behold your St. Katherine’s!’ Of course it is nothing of the kind.  It is not St. Katherine’s.  It is a sham, a house of Shams and Shadows.

Thus was St. Katherine’s destroyed; not for the needs of the City, because it is not clear that the new docks were wanted, or that there was no other place for them, but in sheer inability to understand what the place meant as to the past, and what it might be made to do in the future.  The story of the Hospital has been often told:  partly, as by Ducarel and by Lysons, for the historical interest; partly, as by Mr. Simcox Lea, in protest against the present we of its revenues.  It is with the latter object, though I disagree altogether with Mr. Lea’s conclusions, that I ask leave to tell the story once more.  The story will have to be told, perhaps, again and again, until people can be made to understand the uselessness and the waste and the foolishness of the present establishment in the Park, which has assumed and bears the style and title of St. Katherine’s Hospital by the Tower.

The beginning of the Hospital dates seven hundred and forty years back, when Matilda, Stephen’s Queen, founded it for the purpose of having masses said for the repose of her two children, Baldwin and Matilda, She ordered that the Hospital should consist of a Master, Brothers, Sisters, and certain poor persons—­probably the same as in the later foundation.  She appointed the Prior and Canons of Holy Trinity to have perpetual custody of the Hospital; and she reserved to herself and all succeeding Queens of England the nomination, of the Master.  Her grant was approved by the King, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Pope.  Shortly afterwards William of Ypres bestowed the land of Edredeshede, afterwards called Queenhythe, on the Priory of Holy Trinity, subject to an annual payment of L20 to the Hospital of Katherine’s by the Tower.