blessed company, putting meat into their mouths, they being tied and
not able to stir, nor to help themselves."

Soon orders came that the monks were to be kept very strictly, and the
gaoler could not allow Margaret Clement to visit them; then, one after
another, all but one died.

In 1538 the rest of the monks were turned out of the Charter House.
Sorrowfully they passed out under its great archway, and went their
different ways to places of safety.

And was the Charter House left empty to fall into ruins? No; it became
the property of first one great lord and then of another. They altered
it to meet their needs; the monks' cells disappeared; it became a grand
mansion. Queen Elizabeth and James I. both stayed there.

At last it was sold to Thomas Sutton, a merchant who had made a large
fortune by mining for coal near Newcastle and selling it in London. He
must have been a good old man, for we are told he used often to go into
his quiet garden to pray, "Lord, Thou hast given me a large and liberal
estate; give me also a heart to make use thereof."

He had no children, and when he died, in 1611, he left his great wealth
to found a free school, and a "hospital" where eighty old
men--"soldiers who had {28} borne arms by land or sea, merchants who
had been ruined by shipwreck or piracy, and servants of the King or
Queen,"--could spend their last days in peace. They are called the
Charter House Pensioners. Turn back to picture 7; these two old men
are Pensioners. At first there were to be but forty boys in the
school, but the numbers grew larger and larger; and many a great man
has been educated in the famous Charter House School.

As the years passed on and London spread beyond its walls, the pleasant
fields about the Charter House were covered with streets and houses.
At last, about fifty years ago, the Governors of the school thought it
would be wise to move it to a more open place; so they built a new
school at Godalming in Surrey, and the boys moved into it in 1872.
Into the old buildings they had left came a great day-school, the
Merchant Taylors', so there are still about 500 boys as well as the old
pensioners in the London Charter House.

What a strange history the Charter House has! What changes it has
seen! The convent with its silent monks, the great house with its
state and royal visitors, the noisy school, the peaceful home of the
old pensioners,--the Charter House bears traces of them all. For