DOWN CHANCERY LANE
LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS
“London, Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord
Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.”--DICKENS.
The charming rustic-sounding name of Lincoln’s Inn Fields is known to
everyone--did not Mr. Tulkinghorne live there?--but few people stray
into the old square except those who are at odds with their neighbours
and come to consult the men of law living there, as they did in Dickens’
day. The habitués come from Kingsway through Great Queen Street or
Sardinia Street--the stranger takes the Piccadilly Tube to Holborn
Station and, turning to the right along High Holborn, follows the first
passage on the south side of the street that almost manages to conceal
itself behind a protruding house.
This narrow winding Little Turnstile, and the Great Turnstile, a short
distance farther along, are the only entrances from the north to
Lincoln’s Inn Fields. An ugly lane, connecting these two passages and
parallel with Holborn, is dignified by the disconcerting name of
Whetstone Park. To-day it is only a row of stables, but Milton once had
a lodging in one of the houses, that were always squalid and _mal
habitées_, as Dryden’s plays attest.
Coming out of the tortuous Little Turnstile, you enter the spacious
square of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The very name is alluring enough to make
anyone want to go there, but there is nothing about the gardens to-day
to show that they are among the oldest in London. They are as trim and
well cared for as if they had been laid out yesterday. “Well cared for”
means that all the pleasant green lawns and shady plane-trees are
jealously railed off from the public, who loll somnolently on the many
benches, their back turned to the lovely green oasis. It does not occur
to any of the Fields’ frequenters to turn some of the seats round, so
that they will have a more refreshing view than the dusty asphalt of the
wide paths or the uninspiring sight of the slumbers of the unemployed,
some of whom look as if they had slipped out of the frames of the
Hogarth pictures in the Soane Museum.
It must be confessed that the interest of Lincoln’s Inn Fields lies not
so much in the gardens--modernised out of every semblance of their
seventeenth-century appearance--as in the beautiful old houses
surrounding them--noble, dignified mansions some of those on the west
side, built by Inigo Jones and once owned by Milords of Lindsay, Somers
and Erskine. At the South Kensington Museum there is a
[Illustration: LINCOLN’S INN GATEWAY]
wonderful panelled staircase, a perfect specimen of its kind, that
formerly graced the hall of No. 35.
Lindsay House, now Nos. 59 and 60, one of the Inigo Jones houses, was
built for the Earl of Lindsay, who died fighting for Charles I. at
Edgehill. Peter Cunningham says that it was called Ancaster House when
the fourth earl was created Duke of Ancaster, and that he sold it to the
proud Duke of Somerset--I do not know why Mr. Cunningham insists on his
pride in italics--who married the widow of the Mr. Thomas Thynne whose
murder by Count Koenigsmarck is so dramatically portrayed on his tomb in
Westminster Abbey.
No. 66, at the corner of Great Queen Street, was once occupied by the
Duke of Newcastle, George II.’s prime minister.
We have travelled far searching for freedom in the last 250 years and
one would like to know how the Wellsian attitude is regarded by the
ghost of the creator of this old house--the Marquis of Powis, who built
it in 1686, before he was outlawed by William and Mary because of his
loyalty to James II. He probably chose the site because it was near the
chapel of the Sardinian Ambassador--the oldest Roman Catholic chapel in
London--where the Roman Catholics used to go when they were deprived of
their churches, and where Fanny Burney was married in 1793. It was
removed, unluckily, in 1910.
There have been poets, too, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, before the men of
law took possession. Milton and Thomas Campbell lived at No. 61 and
Lord Tennyson at No. 58, where, you remember, Mr. Tulkinghorne of _Bleak
House_ had his rooms.
It is a house also haunted with memories of Nell Gwynne, for she had
lodgings here and gave birth to the first Duke of St. Albans, while she
was still acting in the nearby theatre in Portugal Row!
This Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre stood just at the back of the Royal
College of Surgeons, on the south side of the square. Three theatres
called the Duke’s Theatre were successively built on the same spot. The
first one was a pioneer in its way, for it was here that regular stage
scenery was introduced in England and that women’s parts were first
played by women. The ubiquitous Pepys was a regular frequenter of the
theatre, and duly recorded his meeting with Nell Gwynne and that here he
saw _Hamlet_ played for the first time.
Though it is seventy-three years since the last theatre was taken down
to enlarge the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, and there is
nothing to be seen of it to-day, I like to keep its memory green because
it was here, on the night of January 29th, 1728, nearly two hundred
years ago, that Lavinia Fenton, the first Polly Peachum, sang herself
into the heart of the Duke of Bolton, when John Rich produced Mr. Gay’s
_Beggar’s Opera_. It ran for sixty-two nights in one season and made
“Gay rich and Rich gay.”
SOANE MUSEUM
“Thus the great city, towered and steepled,
Is doubly peopled,
Haunted by ghosts of the remembered past.”
_London Poems._
There is one museum in London that I do not want to call a museum
because in some ways it is so unlike one. Very few people ever go there.
It is like the palace of the Sleeping Beauty. If you shut your eyes at
the south-west corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and try not to notice the
tentacular Lyons that unblushingly intrudes its smug modern shopfront
into this old-world square, but stroll through the gardens to the north
side, you will see the Soane Museum at No. 13. This is one of the most
curious and neglected corners I have found in London. There are
priceless things here like Hogarth’s _Rake’s Progress_, but for every
hundred visitors who go to the National Gallery of British Art to see
the _Marriage à la Mode_ only one comes to this quaint caravanserai of
all sorts of objects.
Sir John Soane must surely have been the most agreeable bricklayer’s son
who ever made his fortune as a great architect and had a pretty taste in
art. You have only to look at his portrait by Lawrence, one of the last
that great painter finished, to see what a kindly, benevolent man he
was. Why, oh why, did he exact that his collection should remain
unaltered! I know that the guide-books all extol the ingenuity with
which so many things have been fitted into a small space, but if only
one could sweep away the superfluous and unnecessary and rearrange the
house like a perfect specimen of a home of the period, with the great
pictures hung to the best advantage in the largest rooms and the
basement reserved for the sarcophagus in its present place, with the
best of the larger treasures that would be incongruous in the upper
rooms! As it is, you must diligently hunt for what you want to see, for
the delightful catalogue is more useful as a souvenir than a present
help in finding anything.
There are things of human interest, like the watch Queen Anne gave to
Sir Christopher Wren, or the pistol that Peter the Great collared from a
Turkish Bey in 1696, that Alexander I. gave to Napoleon at Tilsit in
1807, and that Sir John Soane provokingly says he purchased under very
peculiar circumstances--or the flamboyant jewel of Charles I. found
among the royal baggage after the battle of Naseby--or Rousseau’s
autograph letter--or those exquisite old books of Hours richly
illuminated and written with such patient skill by some old Flemish monk
five hundred years ago.
But the jewels of this unnoticed casket are the pictures. The courteous
guardians, who all look like retired librarians, show with a certain
melancholy pride the way to the tiny room where hang Turner’s fine
painting of _Van Tromp’s Barge_ and two of his water-colours, Watteau’s
_Les Noces_, and the greatest treasures of the whole collection,
Hogarth’s pictures of _The Rake’s Progress_ and the four big canvases of
_The Election_.
Besides all this there are wonderful Flemish wood carvings and
manuscripts, and, in the crypt, the interesting three-thousand-year-old
tomb of Seti I., King of Egypt, whose inscriptions Sir John did not live
to see deciphered.
There was an air of wistfulness about the place. It had been arranged
with so much loving care, and so few people profit by it though the
reward of going is great.
Perhaps Sir John Soane did not want anybody but art-lovers to see his
collection, or he would surely not have closed it to the public on
Saturday, Sunday and Monday all the year round and for the entire months
of September, December, January and February. It is true that students
and other visitors may apply to the curator for admission at other
times, and foreigners are admitted on presentation of their visiting
card on any day except Sunday and Bank Holidays, but what Londoner, with
richer collections open every day in the week, could be expected to
remember the capriciousness of the guardians of Sir John Soane’s
treasures, who are like the suburban hostess announcing her reception
days as first and third Tuesdays and fifth Friday? In despair of
remembering when the good lady was at home, you would never call on her.
No, if you want to see the Hogarths, my advice is to wrap yourself in
the cloak of a foreigner and present your card at the door of this
neglected London museum between the hours of ten and five.
LINCOLN’S INN
“The Walks of Lincoln’s Inn
Under the Elms.”
BEN JONSON.
Lincoln’s Inn Fields are bordered on the east side by Lincoln’s Inn, but
I like better to approach the old squares by the brick gatehouse in
Chancery Lane. It is the oldest part of Lincoln’s Inn, and a very fine
example of Tudor brickwork. The Sir Thomas Lovel who built it in 1518
put his own arms over the gateway, never dreaming that when his name
would mean nothing to the passer-by, the name of a bricklayer, one Ben
Jonson who worked, with a trowel in one hand and a book in the other, at
the adjoining buildings about a hundred years later, would need no coat
of arms to preserve his memory. People like Mr. Muirhead, who see things
in the light of cold reason, argue that in 1617 Jonson was forty-four
and already famous, so he had probably laid down the trowel,--but I
prefer to believe old Fuller, who said Ben Jonson helped in the building
of the new structure in Lincoln’s Inn.
There are four of these old Inns of Court, that have lasted since the
thirteenth century--the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple, Lincoln’s Inn
and Gray’s Inn. Few visitors to London go out of their way to stroll in
their shady courtyards, but there are not many corners of London where
you can so easily shake off the oppression of the blare of machinery and
recapture the spirit of a time when the study of the law was not thought
incompatible with many pleasanter, more frivolous things.
One old chronicler says: “There is both in the Inns of Court and the
Inns of Chancery, a sort of academy or gymnasium where they learn
singing and all kinds of music, and such other accomplishments and
diversions (which are called revels) as are suitable to their quality
and usually practised at court. All vice is discouraged and banished.
The greatest nobility of the kingdom often place their children in those
Inns of Court--not so much as to make the law their study but to form
their manners.”
I have no predilection for the legal profession, being, like most of my
kind, filled with amazement at the lack of logic and the crass
inconsequences that attend the administration of justice in any country.
In fact I have a fellow-feeling for Peter the Great, who knew his own
mind and had no herd opinions. When he was taken into Westminster Hall,
he inquired who those busy people were in wigs and black gowns. He was
answered, “They are lawyers.” “Lawyers?” said he, with a face of
astonishment. “Why, I have but two in my whole dominions, and I believe
I shall hang one of them the moment I get home.”
I suppose in no country in the world is the study and practice of the
law surrounded with such debonair amenities as in London. Who would not
be a lawyer, since that profession is the Open Sesame to shady gardens,
lodgings in history-haunted rooms, and a prideful possession in such
rare buildings as the Church of the Knights Templars?
Lincoln’s Inn takes its name from a thirteenth century Henry de Lacy,
Earl of Lincoln, who had a mansion in Chancery Lane near the first
church of the Knights Templars. His arms are carved over the brick
gateway, separated from those of the builder, Sir Thomas Lovel, by the
royal arms of England. None of the existing old buildings are later than
Tudor times.
The old Inn has had many illustrious members, lodgers and visitors.
Oliver Cromwell used to come here to see Thurloe, his secretary of
state, who lived at 24 Old Buildings, and there is the story of how he
nearly killed a young clerk he found apparently asleep when he had been
plotting with Thurloe to seize Prince Charles. Thurloe dissuaded him by
passing a lighted candle before the young man’s eyes to prove he was
really asleep, and the clerk lived to warn the prince, who when he
became king paid several visits to Lincoln’s Inn. Both Pepys and Evelyn
record his presence at the “revels,” when learning was encouraged by
indulgence in dancing. In the Admittance Book are the signatures of
Charles II., the Duke of York, Prince Rupert and the Duke of Monmouth,
written in 1671.
Dr. John Donne and Sir Thomas More were both connected with Lincoln’s
Inn. Dr. Donne laid the foundation-stone and preached the consecration
sermon of the chapel that Inigo Jones designed in 1623, since so
disastrously restored. It is built on arches, so you can walk about
under the Gothic roof, as Pepys said he did “by agreement” on the 27th
of June, 1663, but you will not see the six seventeenth-century windows,
for they were shattered by an explosion in October, 1915.
Sir Thomas More has a more intimate connection with the Inn, for his
father and grandfather held the office of butler and steward, and for
their long and faithful services were rewarded by admission into the
Society of Lincoln’s Inn and by the much-prized office of Reader.
The wonderful law library is now housed in the new red-brick hall,
decorated with Watts’ fresco of “The Lawgivers of the World,” but the
old hall built about 400 years ago is still in use, though it, too, has
suffered from the hands of the restorer.
Only the benchers and members of Lincoln’s Inn may use the elm-shaded
gardens. They not only fulfil Pepys’ prophecy that they would be very
pretty, but they had a useful war record, as a memorial tablet shows.
I am told that the Curfew is still rung at Lincoln’s Inn. At a quarter
to nine each evening the chief porter climbs to the tower of the chapel
and when the hour has struck he sounds the curfew fifty times. The bell
used was brought from Cadiz by the Earl of Essex in 1596.
RECORD OFFICE
“Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty.”
WORDSWORTH.
Coming out into Chancery Lane once more and turning down towards Fleet
Street, you will see on your left a huge grey building in Tudor style,
where once stood the House of the Converts.
It was called by that name when Henry III. founded a House in 1232 to
receive converted Jews. I hardly like to tell you that the present name
is the Record Office. It is too pompous and official-sounding, and
perhaps that is why people pass the House of the Converts never
suspecting the presence of the entrancing, memory-evoking things within.
You enter the enchanted room by descending a short flight of stone
steps, after going through a forbidding portal and along a green sward
into a modern grey building in one of the very busiest of the London
streets.
You will know why I call it an enchanted room as soon as you see the
beautiful chapel-like precincts named the House of the Converts nearly
700 years ago, before it was used from Edward III.’s time as the Chapel
of the Rolls.
The stained glass windows give a mellow light to the admirable
Torrigiano monument of a sixteenth century Master of the Rolls and the
delicately carved alabaster tomb of Richard Alington and his wife Jane.
Near by is the recumbent figure of another Master, with the little
figures of his children kneeling below, one of them the little daughter
born on Christmas Day and married when she was only twelve years old, “a
pretty red-headed wench,” to William Cavendish, afterwards Earl of
Devonshire, in the year of grace 1608.
There are all sorts of other treasures in this mysterious room, that is
open to all comers between the hours of two and four, any day in the
week except, alas, Saturday or Sunday.
You may look on the handwriting of “Jane the Quene,” in one of the very
few documents signed by Lady Jane Grey during her nine days’ reign, or
read the pathetic letter written by Mary Queen of Scots to Sir William
Cecil, “Mester Cessilles,” she calls him in the queer Scottish-English
sometimes used by “yowr richt asured good friend, Marie R.”
For here are guarded poignant souvenirs of long-dead men and women, of
whose sorrows and anguish of mind nothing is left but the yellowing
paper covered with the almost illegible writing of their times. You will
find the cry of Sir Philip Sidney to Jaen Wyer the Court surgeon of His
Highness of Cleves, written when he lay dying from his wound at the
battle of Zutphen: “Come, my Weier, come. I am in danger of my life and
I want you here. Neither living or dead shall I be ungrateful. I can
write no more, but I earnestly pray you to make haste. Farewell. At
Arnem. Yours, Ph. Sidney.” And Sir Walter Raleigh’s letter to Queen
Anne, the wife of James the First, where he says: “My extreme shortness
of breath doth grow fast on me, with the dispayre of obtayning so mich
grace to walke with my keeper up the hill within the Tower.”
The letters are not all sorrowful, but they all have the power to
breathe life into the dry bones of history. Not far from the heart-felt
appeal of the great Cardinal Wolsey to Henry VIII., praying for “grace,
mercy, remissyon and pardon,” and signed “Your Graces moste prostrat
poor chapleyn, creature, and bedisman,” is a letter from ten-year-old
William of Orange, quaint letters from Leicester and Essex to their
fickle queen, and a dignified epistle, lamenting the outbreak of war
between France and England, but renouncing his fealty and homage to
Richard II., from a fourteenth century member of that noble Picardie
family whose proud device was:
Roy ne suis,
ne prince ne duc,
ne comte aussy:
Je suis sire de Coucy.
Old letters are not the only treasures in this corner belonging to
another age. There are beautiful fourteenth-century chests, a bulla
carved by Benvenuto Cellini, that prince of goldsmiths and
autobiographers, and indeed the greatest treasure of all, that I have
kept till the last.
One first hears of the Domesday Book in the days when one has visions of
a vast tome with some vague connection with the Day of Judgment. Not
even _Little Arthur_ could dispel the prodigious respect and awe one
felt for it. I confused it with the book in which one’s manifold sins
are recorded, and even mature age does not prevent a little secret
satisfaction that has nothing historical at the sight of those fat,
brown hundreds-of-years-old books that we owe to William the Conqueror’s
Norman love for exact accounts.
The Domesday Books used to be kept in the Chapter House at Westminster
and were only moved to the Record Office in 1839.
NEVILL’S COURT
“Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this
city you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and
squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and
courts.”--DR. JOHNSON.
A stone’s throw from the east end of the Record Office is one of the
most curious unnoticed corners of old London. Go up Fetter Lane, which
is the next turning to Chancery Lane out of Fleet Street, and at No. 34,
close to the Moravian Chapel, you will see a narrow passage called
Nevill’s Court. This passage leads you straight into one of the oldest
bits of London still existing, for here in the very heart of newspaper
land are little ancient seventeenth-century houses with cottage gardens.
They give one the same feeling of unexpectedness as those other queer
little wooden houses with their high gables that you may see in
Collingwood Street, just on the other side of Blackfriars Bridge (I
think it is the third turning to the right). They stand beside the
church, just as they stood nearly three hundred years ago, when the
Thames washed right up to their doorsteps.
At No. 6 Nevill’s Court, secluded in its walled garden, is a big
seventeenth-century house, which must once have been inhabited by
citizens of wealth and position. It is extraordinary that Time and the
Vandal have left it still intact. I think the reason must be that they
have never been able to find it, like those other old houses in Wardrobe
Court near St. Paul’s, whose whereabouts certainly ought to be set as a
problem in a London taxi-driver’s examination.
But before seeking the house, there is something to notice in Nevill’s
Court. The main entrance to the Moravian Chapel is in Fetter Lane, at
No. 33. I once went to the service there at three o’clock on a Sunday
afternoon under the influence of the story of the messenger sent while
Bradbury was preaching, to announce Queen Anne’s death and the safety
of the Protestant succession. I hoped to find something to remind me of
the chapel’s great age: it is the oldest place of Protestant worship in
London, going back to Queen Mary’s day, when persecuted Protestants are
supposed to have met in the sawpit of the carpenter’s yard on this site.
Down the long, narrow passage, I found a bare, uncompromising chapel,
with a high, wooden pulpit, that I looked at with more respect than its
ugliness warranted, remembering that Baxter had preached here in 1672,
and that John Wesley and Whitefield had addressed crowded congregations
during the year Wesley spent with the Moravians between the time that he
left the Church of England and the founding of the Methodist persuasion
in 1740. The boundary line between St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, and St.
Dunstan’s in the West is just in front of the pulpit, so the preacher
and his congregation are in different parishes.
The chapel has been used by the Moravian sect since 1738, and as their
lease does not expire for about another 250 years, it is not likely to
change ownership, in spite of the dwindling congregation.
It has been so many times restored and rebuilt that one gets a much
better idea of the antiquity of the building from the back entrance in
Nevill’s Court, for this is the only part that could possibly have
existed before the Great Fire.
CLIFFORD’S INN
“Oh! London! London! our delight,
Great flower that opens but at night.”
R. LE GALLIENNE.
Between Chancery Lane and Fetter Lane is the entrance to Clifford’s Inn,
the oldest of all the Inns of Chancery. In January, 1921, big flaunting
notice-boards announced that Clifford’s Inn would be sold by auction,
but no immediate purchaser was found, and this quiet corner is still
unmolested, though by the time this book is printed it may have received
its _coup de grâce_ from the pickaxe.
Go and look at it while you may. It was founded in 1345 and takes its
name from a certain Robert Clifford of Edward II.’s reign. Sir Edward
Coke, the great Elizabethan lawyer, was a member of Clifford’s Inn and
left it for the Middle Temple in 1572.
Some of the Inn survived the Great Fire, and in the crazy-looking little
old hall the judges sat who decided the many boundary disputes after
that catastrophe. At the moment it is the headquarters of some society
“duquel je ne sçais pas le nom.”
Samuel Butler lived at No. 15 Clifford’s Inn for thirty-eight years, and
many an admirer of the genius of the man who wrote _Erewhon_ and _The
Way of all Flesh_ has made a pilgrimage to the quiet corner hidden away
a few yards from bustling Fleet Street.