TRAFALGAR SQUARE TO FLEET STREET
“For such things do go on in Fleet Street as no man has
written yet.”
RICHARD JEFFERIES.
One of the most enthralling and endearing things about London is the way
the memory of the great people, whose names are so familiar that you
feel you would know their bearers if you met them, pervades the city and
crops up in such very unexpected places. If business ever took you
through that evil-smelling fishy Lower Thames Street, you would discover
that Chaucer lived there for six years when he was Comptroller of the
Petty Customs in the Port of London. You stroll through the little
Cloisters in Westminster Abbey, of all places in the world, and some one
tells you that Lady Hamilton once lived in the Littlington Tower, when
she was servant to Mr. Hare and had no thought that she would ever
inspire a hero to great victories. You think that when you have seen Sir
Thomas More’s tomb in Chelsea Old Church, and Crosby Hall near by, you
have exhausted the souvenirs of his life, but you find him again in
Westminster Hall, where he was condemned to death--in the Deanery where
he spent two months in charge of the Abbot of Westminster,--in Lincoln’s
Inn--in Milk Street in the City, where he was born, “the brightest star
that ever shone in that Via Lactea”--in the church of St. Lawrence
Jewry where he lectured, and in the Tower where he died.
Dr. Johnson, of course, was ubiquitous. He went everywhere and usually
said something noteworthy about everything. One of the great
difficulties in writing this book has been to refrain from quoting him
too frequently, and Pepys is even worse. The kindly official in the
Clothworkers’ Hall (where I lunched once on a special occasion) said to
me: “Samuel Pepys, Ma’am, Pepys the great Diarist--you may have heard of
him,” and I felt like replying: “My good man, I have been with your
Pepys through Chelsea--and in St. Margaret’s, Westminster, where he was
married--I have seen his portrait at the Royal Society Rooms in
Burlington House and his house in Buckingham Street--the church of St.
Bride, where his birth was registered--St. Lawrence Jewry, where he was
disappointed with Wilkins’ sermon--All Hallows, Barking, that, as he
wrote on the 5th September, 1666, only just escaped the Great Fire--his
parish church of St. Olave’s, where he worshipped, and Hyde Park, where
he used to go driving with his wife.”
THE STRAND
“Through the long Strand together let us stray,
With thee conversing I forget the way.”
GAY.
Of all delightful places to meet memories of famous bygone people, the
most intriguing is the Strand. A superficial glance at this modern
bustling street shows little of the past still clinging about it. But a
little further on you will discover, if you look for them, a bit of
Roman London, a Renaissance chapel, a statue with a history, a lovely
group of eighteenth-century houses, the water gate of a former fine
mansion on the riverside, and a church that links us to the time of the
Danish invasion.
The Londoner would probably tell you that Piccadilly Circus is the
centre of his city; the historian, St. Paul’s; but to the foreigner, the
visitor from overseas, or to the Anglo-Indian back from the East, the
centre will always be Charing Cross.
It has been a starting-point for the traveller from the days when the
little old village of Charing was used as a halting-place on the way to
the City or to the Royal Palace of Westminster. Probably that is the
true derivation of the name; “La Charrynge” meant the Turning, the great
bend where the two roads met, but a prettier tradition derives its name
from Edward I.’s dear queen (“chère Reine”). Another cross to her memory
once stood here, the most beautiful of all those set up by the sorrowing
king wherever her bier rested on its journey from Grantham to
Westminster Abbey. Cromwell’s Parliament, with its passion for
destruction, pulled it down in 1647, and the column which now stands in
the courtyard in front of the station is only a memorial modelled as
far as possible on the original design. It was set up by Barry about
sixty years ago, but it is already so weather-beaten that many people
are under the amiable delusion that it is the very cross erected in
1291.
The exact position of the old cross is now covered by King Charles I. on
horseback, facing the scene of his death in Whitehall, and this statue
has had an even more adventurous history.
It was cast originally in 1633 and after the king’s execution it became
so unpopular that Parliament sold it to a brazier to be melted down.
With an eye to the possibilities of the future that a diplomat might
envy, this man cannily buried the statue and did a roaring trade with
the Royalists in relics supposed to have been made from the fragments.
After the Restoration the statue quietly came to light again, and was
set up in its present position in 1674 with popular rejoicings. Its
tribulations were not yet over. The day of the burning of Her Majesty’s
Theatre, the sword, a real one of the period, that hung at the side, was
broken off, and it has never been replaced.
Another curious thing about this statue lies in the absence of girths to
the saddle or trappings on the horse, and it is said that when this
oversight was pointed out to the sculptor Le Sueur, he was so overcome
with mortification that he committed suicide on the spot.
In the days when London was no bigger than one of our second-rate
provincial towns, Charing Cross was its market square. Here stood the
pillory, even as late as the beginning of the last century; here were
read the Royal proclamations, and here were the booths of the showmen
who dealt in giants and fat ladies,--it was here, too, that Punch made
his first appearance in England in 1666. Where the railway station now
stands was Hungerford Market, and Trafalgar Square occupies the yard of
what were once the Royal Mews, where the king’s falcons were kept till
they were replaced by the king’s horses. It is rather odd that the word
“mews” is now always associated with stables, for it once meant the pens
or coops in which moulting falcons were kept (from the French _muer_--to
moult). Geoffrey Chaucer, who lodged at Westminster, was in his time
Clerk of the King’s Works and of the Royal Mews.
WATER GATES
“In some parts of London we may go back through the
whole English history, perhaps through the history of man.”
LEIGH HUNT.
People seem to think that a great deal of time and energy must be spent
if they wish to see anything of historic London, and they pass by,
unnoticed, many of the most interesting reminders of bygone periods,
just because they may see them every day.
Buckingham Street, leading out of the Strand, is only a stone’s throw
from Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross and it is full of historic
memories. What stories the beautiful old water gate at its foot could
tell of the days when the silver Thames washed up and down its grey
stone steps, and of the famous people who used to take boat there!
It was built by my Lord Duke of Buckingham, that hated favourite of
James and Charles the First, who cuts such a sorry figure in English
history books and such a romantic one in the pages of Dumas. He was the
father of the extravagant, erratic George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham,
whom Scott describes in _Peveril of the Peak_, and Pope more pungently:
Who in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon.
Lely painted a wonderful portrait of the son. It hangs in the National
Portrait Gallery, but even more interesting is the Vandyck picture of
him with his brother Francis, painted when they were boys, and lately
bought for the National Gallery.
With his father murdered, and his property confiscated by the
Commonwealth and given to General Fairfax, the duke solved his problem
by marrying the General’s daughter and heiress, a solution for which
Cromwell made him pay by a sojourn in the Tower, where he was an
intermittent resident. But in spite of his wife’s fortune the man who,
“was everything by turns and nothing long” was obliged to sell the
magnificent mansion that his father had re-built in 1625 on the site of
the old York House.
The earlier mansion had been the home of the Bishop of Norwich in Henry
VIII.’s time, of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, of the Archbishop of
York, who gave the house its name, and of Sir Francis Bacon who loved
the place and only left it for the Tower.
In 1672 the second York House was sold for £30,000, with the stipulation
that the streets built on the site were to be given the Duke’s names.
They are quite easy to trace: there is George Court, with the George
Tavern, where you may eat your chop to the sound of an orchestra of
singing birds; hard by are Villiers and Duke Streets; “Of” Lane has been
rechristened York Place,--and now we are back in Buckingham Street.
The new quarter soon had famous tenants. John Evelyn lived for a year in
Villiers Street, and forty years later Sir Richard Steele had a house
there. No. 14, Buckingham Street, has been much remodelled since Samuel
Pepys lived there and walked down the steps of the water gate on his way
to visit his friend Mr. Cole in Brentford. There is a tablet on the
house to tell the passer-by that the Earl of Oxford, William Etty and
Clarkson Stanfield, the marine painter, also lived here.
The house opposite looks far more modern, but within the very new outer
walls of the offices of the Royal National Pension Fund for Nurses are
preserved much of the exquisite carving, ceiling paintings, and
elaborate stucco work that belong to the time when Peter the Great, Czar
of all the Russias, came over to England in 1698 and lodged in these
very rooms. David Hume, Rousseau, Fielding and Black all lived at No.
15, now incorporated in No. 16, but the Dickens lover will ignore these
famous names and only remember that the rooms at the top of the house
are the very ones taken by Miss Betsy Trotwood for David Copperfield.
With the exception perhaps of that Shah of Persia who spent a happy
holiday in England in the reign of the late Queen Victoria, I suppose we
never had a more eccentric royal visitor than Peter the Great. No doubt
that is the reason why the memories of his brief stay here still seem to
cling about so many parts of London. This strange being, half-barbarian,
half-genius, had great ambitions and achieved them. As Voltaire says:
“He gave a polish to his people and was himself a savage; he taught them
the art of war, of which he was himself ignorant; inspired by the sight
of a small boat on the river Moskwa, he erected a powerful fleet and
made himself an expert and active shipwright, pilot, sailor and
commander; he changed the manners, customs and laws of the Russians, and
lives in their memory as the father of his country.”
Ships and shipbuilding were his passion. He went to Holland and worked
in the yards there as a mechanic, calling himself Pieter Timmermann,
until he had mastered the manual part of his craft. Then he came to
England to study the theory of shipbuilding. King William III. placed
the house in Buckingham Street, so conveniently close to the river, at
his disposal, and invited him to Court when he felt inclined. But Pieter
hated crowds and ceremonies and preferred to spend his days in hard work
and his evenings drinking and smoking with boon companions.
At the end of a month, finding himself too far from the dockyards, he
moved to Deptford, and put up at Sayes Court, kindly lent to him by John
Evelyn. He was a dreadful tenant. We all know how Evelyn loved his
garden,--but the Czar and his rough crowd trampled the flower-beds and
spoilt the grass-plots, and trundled wheelbarrows through the diarist’s
pet holly-hedge for exercise. “There is a house full of people _right
nasty_!” wrote Evelyn’s indignant servant to his master. They ate and
drank enormously,--eight bottles of sack after dinner were nothing to
Pieter, and listen to this for a breakfast menu for twenty-one persons:
half a sheep, a quarter of lamb, ten pullets, twelve chickens, three
quarts of brandy, six quarts of mulled wine, seven dozen of eggs, with
salad in proportion.
Much of his time, when he was not gathering
[Illustration: WATER GATE, YORK HOUSE]
the vast store of information that he afterwards used to such excellent
advantage, the Czar spent sailing on the river, and in the evening he
would repair with favoured members of his suite to a public-house in
Great Tower Street. The old tavern has been rebuilt, but the name “The
Czar of Muscovy,” and later “The Czar’s Head,” that it adopted as a
compliment to its imperial visitor, is there to this day, and you may
see it close to the city merchant’s house at No. 34 that is noticed in
another chapter.
The “right nasty” people did not stay long, luckily for Evelyn’s peace
of mind, but returned to London for another month or two. Then saying
good-bye to King William, who had certainly treated him very well, the
Czar pressed into his hand a little twist of brown paper, in which was
found a ruby valued at £10,000, and sailed away home for Russia, taking
with him no fewer than 500 English captains, scientists, pilots,
gunners, surgeons, sail-makers, anchor-smiths, coppersmiths and the
like, all ready for adventure in the unknown, according to the tradition
of their race.
To come back to the Strand. It is fairly certain that the rather heavy
and unattractive stone archway and steps at the bottom of Essex Street
(at the other end of the Strand) formed the water gate of old Essex
House, once occupied by the Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s favourite.
It compares very badly with the water gate in Buckingham Street, which
was designed by Inigo Jones in 1625, and built by Nicholas Stone the
master mason, who carved one of the lions on its frontage. The London
climate has blurred the outline of the arms of the Villiers family on
the south side, and the motto “Fidei Coticula Crux” on the north, and
the raising of the Embankment now prevents the waters of the Thames from
swirling round the old stone steps. No monarch had passed through the
water gate since the days of Charles II. until Queen Alexandra came to
open the new building in Buckingham Street in 1908. Its glory has
departed, but there it stands, useless, unnoticed and forgotten, yet how
beautiful!
THE ADELPHI
“I like the spirit of this great London which I feel
around me.”
C. BRONTË.
Retracing your steps up Buckingham Street, turn to the right along Duke
Street and John Street, and you will find yourself in the Adelphi, that
oasis of calm quiet so near the roar of the bustling Strand, where
famous authors of the present day like to pitch their luxurious tents.
Note the steep hill up which you climb. This is the roof of the arches
which the brothers Adam built over the site of old Durham House in order
that they might erect their elegant houses on a level with the Strand.
You can still wander in these vaults, if you are lucky enough to find
an open gate; they are curious, and were once a fine rendezvous for evil
characters.
The Duke of Buckingham’s names are not the only ones to be perpetuated
here. The architects, Robert, John, James and William Adam, all had
streets named after them, and they called the whole quarter the Adelphi
because they were brothers.
William Street has lately been rechristened Durham House Street, to
remind us that the Adelphi was built on the site of Durham House, where
Lady Jane Grey was born.
Probably the Adelphi will have to go some day, when a proper bridge for
Charing Cross is built across the river here, but lovers of this little
bit of unspoiled Georgian London will miss its old-world charm and
dignity.
ST. CLEMENT DANES
“Blith be thy chirches, wele sownyng be thy bellis.”
DUNBAR.
Nowadays, looking eastward up the Strand, the eye is caught by the two
churches of St. Mary-le-Strand and St. Clement Danes, standing isolated
in the centre of the roadway, whilst the traffic roars past on either
side. In the Middle Ages you would still have seen St. Clement’s, though
half engulfed in a rookery of ill-smelling, crazy old timbered houses,
with so narrow a passage between that coachmen called it the “Straits
of St. Clement’s.” But on the site of St. Mary’s stood a maypole, one
hundred feet high, dear to the heart of the city youth for the
merrymakings that took place around it. Such giddy proceedings vexed the
Puritans, who swept it away in an outburst of righteous indignation, but
old customs die hard, and at the Restoration another and still lordlier
pole was set up with royal approval, and dancing and junketings went on
around it for many a long day.
The church of St. Clement’s takes us back to very ancient history. Some
say that beneath it lie the bones of King Harold and other Danish
invaders. What is pretty certain is that the original church was built,
after the expulsion of the Danes, by the few settlers who, having
married English wives, chose to remain behind, on condition that they
did not stir out of the strip of land that lay between the Isle of
Thorney, now Westminster, and Caer Lud, now Ludgate.
Travellers from all over the world who have shared the common traditions
of childhood, feel a queer sense of kinship when they pass along the
Strand and suddenly hear the old bells ringing out the familiar tune of
“Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.” The bells of the
nursery-rhyme are not those of St. Clement Danes, but of the St.
Clement’s, Eastcheap, which for centuries has been in the centre of the
dried fruit trade.
[Illustration: ST. CLEMENT DANES]
The bells were famous even in Shakespeare’s day. “We have heard the
chimes at midnight, Master Shallow,” says Falstaff in _Henry IV_. Those
chimes are gone, but the present peal of ten bells, cast in 1693, is as
famous for its music.
One might write a whole history of church bells, from the time when
Turketul, Abbot of Croyland in Lincolnshire, in the ninth century,
presented his abbey with the great bell GUTHLAC, and added six others
with the rhythmic names of PEGA, BEGA, BETTELIN, BARTHOMEW, TATWIN and
TURKETUL, to make a peal.
In the early monkish days they looked upon bells as the voices of good
angels: they were blessed and dedicated: the passing bell was tolled to
keep off evil spirits from the dead. Henry VIII., that ruthless
iconoclast, cared little for superstition, and in the general
destruction of the religious houses hundreds of old bells were sold or
melted down. But the pious people of those days would point out how the
Bishop of Bangor, who sold his Cathedral bells, was shortly afterwards
stricken with blindness, and that Sir Miles Partridge won the Jesus
Bells of St. Paul’s from King Henry at play and, proceeding to remove
them and have them melted down, was hanged soon after on Tower Hill.
The bells of St. Clement’s were added after the church had been rebuilt
in 1692, under the supervision of Sir Christopher Wren, who gave his
services for nothing in his usual generous-hearted way.
[Illustration: Dʳ. Johnson’s Pew in Sᵗ. Clement Dane’s Church]
St. Clement’s is dear to all true Londoners as Dr. Johnson’s church. You
may see the very pew where he sat, and there is something about the
solid, handsome structure that seems to fit the thought of the ponderous
great man who worshipped there Sunday by Sunday, striving “to purify and
fortify his soul and hold real communion with the Highest.” It is a fine
and a prosperous church, and so richly endowed that at one time all the
paupers of the neighbourhood used to flock there for the sake of what
they could get. That they were well looked after, the carefully kept
parish registers bear witness as far back as 1558. There are other
interesting entries in the old registers. You may read of the baptism of
Master Robert Cicill, the sonne of ye L. highe Threasurer of England,
and of the marriage of Sir Thomas Grosvenor with Mary Davies, the child
heiress of Ebury Manor, who brought to her husband all those lands of
Pimlico and Belgravia from whose rents the Dukes of Westminster draw the
bulk of their colossal fortune. Her life story has been published
recently by Mr. Charles T. Gatty in his two-volumed _Mary Davies and the
Manor of Ebury_.
CHAPEL ROYAL OF THE SAVOY
“It is a wonderful place ... this London ... and
what do I know of it?”--LORD BEACONSFIELD.
From St. Mary’s and St. Clement’s it is but a few minutes’ walk back
along the Strand to the Chapel Royal of the Savoy, that once served all
the district, but it is now perhaps the tiniest parish in London west of
Temple Bar. There it stands in its quiet graveyard, all that is left to
remind us of “the fayrest manor in England.” The old palace of the Savoy
was built by Simon de Montfort, that “Cromwell of the Middle Ages,” on
land granted by Henry III. to his wife’s uncle, Peter of Savoy, for
which the said Peter had to pay the not very exorbitant rent of three
barbed arrows. Afterwards it came into the possession of the Dukes of
Lancaster. Here it was, in 1357, that the Black Prince, riding on a
little black hackney, brought his prisoner King John of France, who
stayed here, with brief intervals, till his death, as nobody seemed able
to raise the money for his ransom. And here lived John of Gaunt, with
his numerous household, not least of whom was Geoffrey Chaucer. Later
came Henry IV., who annexed the manor, and since his time it has always
belonged in a particular manner to the reigning house.
Nothing is left, though, to tell of it, save the chapel, which was begun
by Henry VII. in place of a more ancient one fallen into decay,--and
that strange judicial survival, the Court Leet with view of Frankpledge
of the Manor and Liberty of the Savoy. Few people know that once a year
the jury of the Court, headed by the Beadle with his silver-topped and
carved staff of office, solemnly makes the round to inspect the boundary
marks of the Manor. One is in Child’s Bank, another on the Lyceum stage,
one in Burleigh Street, one by Cleopatra’s Needle, another in Middle
Temple Lawn, where many scuffles have taken place in the past between
the jurymen and indignant Benchers and officers of the Inns of Court
concerning the question of trespass. The Court itself, which dates back
to Saxon days, sits annually about Easter time, and still does “what is
usually called everybody’s business, and nobody’s business,” as a
former High Bailiff wrote.
The old Roman Bath in Strand Lane is a little beyond St. Clement Dane’s,
and next to the Tube station. That belongs to a later chapter, but a
short way further, on the same side of the road, is another bit of
unnoticed London.
PRINCE HENRY’S ROOM
“London, thou art the flour of Cities all.”--DUNBAR.
Prince Henry’s room is one of those charming links with the past that
lie unnoticed in the path of thousands who never stop to heed the story.
At No. 17, Fleet Street, close to the ceaseless traffic of the Law
Courts, is an unobtrusive timbered house. Through a low archway you see
an eighteenth-century oaken stairway that leads to a sedate Jacobean
room, where very few people ever come to disturb the peaceful, dignified
atmosphere. The Council of the Duchy of Cornwall is supposed to have
once met here regularly and I believe that from time to time Prince
Henry’s room is now used for the meetings of various associations, but
if you visit it any day between ten and four you will almost certainly
find no one to disturb the ghosts of bygone cavaliers but the war
veteran who passes his days there ruminating on the delinquencies of
historians.
The house is one of the oldest in the City. It was built in 1610, the
year that Henry, the elder son of James I. of England, was created
Prince of Wales; and the room is known as Prince Henry’s room. Look at
the lovely Jacobean art of the panelling on the west wall, and the
decorated plaster ceiling, where in the centre you will find the device
of this lamented “prince of promise,” who died at the early age of
eighteen.
Most people say, “Prince Henry! _who_ was Prince Henry?” and very few
connect the name with that little known prince who steals like a shadow
across the pages of our history books. But his memory deserves to be
kept green if only for the reason that he was a true friend to Sir
Walter Raleigh, that unfortunate Victim of petty-minded James. After one
of his visits to Raleigh in the Garden House of the Tower, Prince Henry
said: “No man but my father would keep such a bird in a cage.” A stained
glass window sets forth his titles in old French,
Dv. treshavlt. et. trespvissant. Prince. Henry: Filz. Aisne. dv.
Roy. Nre. Seign. Prince. de. Gavles: Duc: de: Cornvaile: et.
Rothsay. Comte: de. Chestre. Chevalier. dv. tresnoble. Ordre. de.
la. Iartierre. enstalle. le. 2. de. Iuliet. 1603.
He was in many ways the prototype of our own Prince of Wales and held
almost as high a place in the affections of his people. He was
everything that a king’s son should be. He was handsome, well-grown and
athletic; he was scholarly and brilliant, having all James’ love of
learning without his folly and effeminacy. If he was a paragon of
erudition, he also loved the practical side of shipbuilding, and he
liked to give and receive hard knocks in the miniature tournaments that
he organised at Whitehall, when he and his friends would engage the
whole evening in mighty battles with sword and pike. And in addition to
all this he seems to have had the generous mind and temper of the truly
great. It is no wonder that his untimely death evoked a cry of mourning
throughout England.
He was playing tennis, threw off his coat and caught a mortal chill.
Everything that the doctors of that day could do was done. They even
applied pigeons to his head and a split cock to his feet. Sir Walter
Raleigh, who loved the youth, sent from his prison in the Tower the
recipe of a potent “quintescence”; it did more good than the pigeons or
the split cock, but could not save him. Prince Henry died in 1612, when
not quite nineteen years of age.
This is what they wrote of him after his death:
Loe! Where he shineth yonder,
A fixed star in heaven;
Whose motion heere came under
None of your planets seaven.
If that the moone should tender
The sunne her love, and marry,
They both would not engender
So great a star as Harry.
THE TEMPLE
“He didn’t understand the whispers of the Temple
fountain though he passed it every day.”--DICKENS.
I know of a public school and university man who has lived all his life
in London and protests that he has never seen Westminster Abbey: there
are certainly hundreds of people who have never seen the Temple.
It would be a marvel to me that anyone should leave London without
having wandered at least once in those courts, if I had not taken so
long to find my own way there. One knows vaguely that it is a charming
place, but going there is postponed for that _fata morgana_, a day of
leisure, that recedes as it is approached, and time passes and the train
whistles and steams slowly out of Euston or Victoria, leaving behind one
of the very loveliest corners in old London,--so easy to reach it one
had but tried.
You have only to turn through the old gatehouse that Wren built in 1684
to wander about in another world,--a world where it is possible to
imagine dear Charles Lamb moving among his guests on a Wednesday
evening, with Mary hovering in the background, or Goldsmith giving those
rackety supper parties at No. 2 Brick Court that disturbed his studious
neighbour Blackstone.
Few places in London are so filled with the memories of brilliant
Englishmen as the Temple. If you want to know all about when and where
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE CHURCH. THE ROUND]
they lived, go to the wigmaker who conducts the Temple affairs from his
little shop in Essex Court, and he will provide you with Mr. Bellot’s
fascinating _Story of the Temple_.
Expert sightseers of course know all about it. They will tell you that
Lamb was born in No. 2, Crown Office Row, and that Thackeray lived at
No. 19; that Goldsmith died at No. 2, Brick Court, Middle Temple Lane,
and that Johnson’s Buildings are on the site of Dr. Johnson’s rooms in
Inner Temple Lane, and if you share their predilections you can go and
peer at the actual bricks that have once sheltered these great men. But
if you want to feel the real spirit of the place, unhampered by gazing
at any particular pile of bricks and mortar, go to the old Temple Church
on a Sunday morning.
Take any bus along the Strand past Temple Bar, where Dr. Johnson used to
say that if he stationed himself between eleven and four o’clock, every
sixth passer-by was an author,--and go through the second entrance to
the Temple called Inner Temple Lane. Or else take the Underground to the
Temple and, walking along the Embankment, go up the Essex Street steps
and turn into the Temple courts by the first gate you find open, even if
that means going round into Fleet Street.
The service in the Temple is an unforgettable revelation. There is no
reason why psalms should not be sung in every Anglican church in the
world as they are sung in the Temple, but no one seems to have thought
of it, except the Temple choirmaster, who has trained his choristers to
sing the words as if they had a profound meaning.
Has anyone ever found fitting phrases to describe the peculiar beauty of
the Temple Church, with its carved Norman porch, that twelfth-century
Round Church, where nine recumbent Crusaders rest in peace, and gleaming
marble pillars support both the choir and the Round? It must be seen to
be believed, but I pity the traveller who leaves London without seeing
it.
In the courts of the Temple there lie embalmed so many stories of so
many ages, that everyone finds what suits his fancy. You may wander as
Spenser did among
Those bricky towers,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
There whilom wont the Templar Knights to bide,
Till they decayed through pride.
Or you may choose a century later and go to York and Lancastrian times,
and listen to Suffolk saying:
Within the Temple Hall we were too loud,
The garden here is more convenient;
and Richard Duke of York’s reply,
Let him that is a true-born gentleman,
And stands upon the honour of his birth,
If he suppose that I have pleaded truth,
From off this briar pluck a white rose with me:
and the Duke of Somerset:
Let him that is no coward nor no flatterer,
But dare maintain the party of the truth,
Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me.
* * * * *
This brawl to-day,
Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden,
Shall send, between the red rose and the white,
A thousand souls to death and deadly night.
It seems a pity that the Temple authorities do not so far unbend as to
subscribe to the pretty legend by re-planting the gardens with red and
white roses. It would give immense pleasure to countless transatlantic
visitors, whose history books are fairly impartial on York and
Lancastrian questions.
Then there are all the memories of gallant Elizabethan days, when the
queen came and dined with the benchers in the great Middle Temple Hall
and _Twelfth Night_ was first performed here. It was by his dancing at
one of the famous revels that the handsome youth Christopher Hatton
first attracted the notice of Elizabeth, a moment when as our allies
would say he lost a good chance of remaining quiet. The Hall is shown to
visitors before twelve o’clock and after three on week-days and after
church on Sundays. Peter Cunningham says the roof is the best piece of
Elizabethan architecture in London.
What feasts they had there in the days when lawyers had time to make
merry. Here is the account of one old chronicler:
For every feast the steward provided five fat hams with spices and
cakes, and the chief butler seven dozen gilt and silver spoons,
twelve damask table-cloths and twenty candlesticks. The constable
wore gilt armour and a plumed helmet, and bore a pole axe in his
hands. On St. Thomas’s Eve a parliament was held, when the two
youngest brothers, bearing torches, preceded the procession of
benchers, the officers’ names were called and the whole society
passed round the hearth singing a carol. On Christmas Eve the
minstrels, sounding, preceded the dishes, and dinner done, sang a
song at the high table; after dinner the oldest masters of the
revels and other gentlemen sang songs.
It sounds very cheerful and amiable, but it is difficult to imagine our
modern lawyers passing round the hearth singing a carol.
I suppose that the three best-loved dwellers in the Temple were Oliver
Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb, and none of them were lawyers.
Johnson was living in No. 1 Inner Temple Lane when Topham Beauclerk and
Mr. Langton knocked him up at three in the morning to see if he could be
persuaded to finish the night with them, and he came out with a poker,
and his little black wig on, and said when he understood their errand,
“What, is it you, you dogs, I’ll have a frisk with you.”
The story of Goldsmith’s tenancy of the Temple reminds one of the tales
told of Balzac, whose tastes and weaknesses he shared. Always in
financial difficulties, as soon as he made a little money he bought
quantities of clothes and furniture and ran into debt to his tailor,
perhaps for the very red velvet coat with lace ruffles that you may see
to-day in the London Museum at Lancaster House. Goldsmith had many
London lodgings and only came to the Temple in 1764. When he died there
ten years later the staircase of this improvident, extravagant genius
was crowded with the poor he had managed to help. No one seems to know
exactly where he lies buried in the Temple churchyard.
Lamb was a true child of the Temple as he was born there. It may be
heresy, but I have always wished he had not called it “the most elegant
spot in the metropolis”; he loved it more than that, as all readers of
_The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple_ know well.
No one leaves the Temple without pausing in Fountain Court, where Ruth
Pinch used to meet Tom. It is by far the most charming of all the courts
of the Temple. “I lived in Fountain Court for ten years,” wrote Arthur
Symons, “and I thought then and I think still, that it is the most
beautiful place in London.”