ickings 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.

This was the original foundation. It was not a Charity; it was a
Religious House