THE MIDDLE TEMPLE
The passage I have quoted from Thackeray at the end of the last chapter
shadows forth eloquently enough something of the feeling of respect and
awe which the young barrister--and even those who are not young
barristers--may naturally feel for the precincts within which the great
English Lawyers lived and worked--the Inns of Court, where the splendid
fabric of English Law was gradually built up, ‘not without dust and
heat.’
But for most laymen the Temple and its sister Inns have other and
perhaps more obvious charms. For as we pass by unexpected avenues into
‘the magnificent ample squares and classic green recesses’ of the
Temple, they seem to be bathed in the rich afterglow of suns that have
set, the light which never was on sea or land, shed by the glorious
associations connected with some of the greatest names in English
literature. Here, we remember, by fond tradition Geoffrey Chaucer is
reputed to have lived. Here Oliver Goldsmith worked and died, and here
his mortal remains were laid to rest. Here, within hail of his beloved
Fleet Street, Dr. Johnson dwelt, and Blackstone wrote his famous
‘Commentaries.’ Here the gentle Elia was born. Hither possibly came
Shakespeare to superintend the production of ‘Twelfth Night.’ Here, in
the Inner Temple Hall, was acted the first English tragedy, ‘Gorboduc;
or Ferrex and Porrex,’ a bloodthirsty play, by Thomas Sackville, Lord
High Treasurer of England, and Thomas Norton, both members of the Inner
Temple. And hither, to witness these or other performances, came the
Virgin Queen.
The main entrance to the Middle Temple is the gateway from Fleet Street,
scene of many a bonfire lit of yore by Inns of Court men on occasions of
public rejoicing.[29] This characteristic building, of red brick and
Portland stone, with a classical pediment, was designed by Sir
Christopher Wren, and built, as an inscription records, in 1684. An old
iron gas-lamp hangs above the arch, beneath the sign of the Middle
Temple Lamb.
Wren’s noble gate-house replaced a Tudor building, erected, according to
tradition, by Sir Amias Paulet, who, being forbidden--so Cavendish[30]
tells the story--to leave London without license by Cardinal Wolsey,
‘lodged in this Gate-house, which he re-edified and sumptuously
beautified on the outside with the Cardinal’s Arms, Hat, Cognisance,
Badges, and other devices, in a glorious manner,’ to appease him. The
fact seems to be that this old Gateway was built in the ordinary way
when one Sir Amisius Pawlett was Treasurer.[31]
Adjoining this Gateway is Child’s Bank, where King Charles himself once
banked, and Nell Gwynne and Prince Rupert, whose jewels were disposed of
in a lottery by the firm. Part of this building covers the site of the
famous Devil’s Tavern, which boasted the sign of St. Dunstan--patron of
the Church so near at hand--tweaking the devil’s nose. Here Ben Jonson
drank the floods of Canary that inspired his plays; hither to the sanded
floor of the Apollo club-room came those boon companions of his who
desired to be ‘sealed of the tribe of Ben,’ and here, in after-years,
Dr. Johnson loved to foregather, and Swift with Addison, Steele with
Bickerstaff.
Immediately within the Gateway, on the left, is
[Illustration: THE MIDDLE TEMPLE GATEHOUSE IN FLEET STREET
IT stands on the south side close to the site of Temple Bar, was
designed by Sir Christopher Wren, and built in 1684.]
an old and very picturesque stationer’s shop, belonging to the firm of
Abram and Sons, in whose family it has been since 1774. It is much more
than a stationer’s shop, for Messrs. Abram have accumulated in the
course of years a very valuable and interesting collection of old deeds
and documents and prints. The overhanging stories of the house rest upon
a row of slender iron pillars--pillars which Dr. Johnson used to touch
with superstitious reverence each time he passed, in unconscious
continuation of that ancient pillar-worship of which many traces linger,
for those who have eyes to see, about the Temple and St. Paul’s. We are
now in Middle Temple Lane, the narrow street down which the citizens of
London were wont to hurry in order to take boat to Westminster from the
Temple Stairs, in the days when the River was the highway between the
City and the Court, between London and Westminster, the counting-houses
of the merchants and the palace and abbey of the King. Of late years the
introduction of tramways and of motor traffic on the Embankment has
tended largely to revive the popularity of the old route, though not all
the thousands of pounds squandered by the London County Council upon an
ill-considered scheme of steamboats could induce the Londoner to adopt
again the water-way, which the bend of the River and the tide must make
slow. Next below us on the left is the group of chambers called Hare
Court, a plain to ugly, red-brick to stock-brick barracks, through which
one can reach the Temple Church. Beyond, on the right, we come to what
remains of Brick Court. This is a most charming specimen of the Queen
Anne style. An inscription over the doorway of No. 3, _Phœnicis
instar revivisco_, informs us that it rose like the Phœnix from its
ashes in 1704. But in this present year of Grace (1909), an old brick
building has been removed, which fronted the Hall and the Lane, and
which claimed to be the oldest building left in the Temple, the first
constructed of brick, erected there in Elizabeth’s reign, and referred
to by Spenser in the lines of his ‘Prothalamion’:--
‘Those bricky towres,
The which on Themmes brode aged backe doe ryde,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
There whylome wont the Templar Knights to byde,
Till they decayed thro’ pride.’
There is nothing, however, to prove that Spenser was referring to Brick
Court. The ‘Prothalamion’ was published in 1596; and I would suggest
that the phrase ‘bricky towres’ might apply most naturally to the Middle
Temple Hall.
Of all the Chambers in the Inns of Court rich in reminiscences of famous
men, none are so redolent of literary fame as No. 2, Brick Court. We
cannot, as Thackeray[32] wrote, who himself, like Winthrop Mackworth
Praed, had chambers here, pass without emotion ‘the staircase which
Johnson, Burke, and Reynolds trod to see their friend, their kind
Goldsmith--the stair on which the poor women sat weeping bitterly when
they heard that the greatest and most generous of all men was dead
within the black oak door.’
Not the Temple, but No. 6, Wine Office Court, nearly opposite the
Cheshire Cheese, was the scene of Dr. Johnson’s famous rescue of the
author of ‘The Vicar of Wakefield,’ who had been arrested by his
landlady for his rent, and sent for his friend in great distress. ‘I
sent him a guinea,’ says Johnson, ‘and promised to come to him
directly.... I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had
a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the
bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means
by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel
ready for the press. I looked into it, and saw its merit; told the
landlady I should soon return, and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it
for sixty pounds.’
Goldsmith left Wine Office Court and lodged for a while in Gray’s Inn,
and thence migrated to some humble Chambers upon the site of No. 2,
Garden Court, Middle Temple (1764). These buildings have disappeared.
But the success of his play, ‘The Good-Natured Man,’ for which he
received £500, enabled him to launch forth into more splendid
apartments. He purchased the lease of No. 2, Brick Court, which still
stands as he left it, for £400. He furnished his rooms with mahogany and
Wilton carpets, and, bedecking himself in a suit of ‘Tyrian bloom satin
grain,’ prepared to entertain his most aristocratic acquaintances.
Johnson, Percy, Reynolds, Bickerstaff, and a host of other friends of
either sex, climbed those stairs to the rooms on the second floor on the
right-hand side (‘two pair right’), were entertained to dinners and
suppers, much to the discomposure of the studious Blackstone, who,
painfully compiling his great ‘Commentaries’ in the chambers below,
found good cause to grumble at the racket made by ‘his revelling
neighbour.’[33] And some years later the staircase that led to the rooms
of that most lovable of geniuses was crowded by friends, ‘mourners of
all ranks and conditions of life, conspicuous among them being the
outcasts of both sexes, who loved and wept for him because of the
goodness he had done.’[34] For from these rooms, one April afternoon,
the mortal remains of Oliver Goldsmith were borne forth, to be buried
somewhere on the north side of the Temple Church. The exact spot is not
known, but as near to it as can be ascertained a plain gravestone now
bears the inscription (1860): ‘Here lies Oliver Goldsmith.’ The
Goldsmith Buildings, that run parallel to the north side of the Church,
belong, like Lamb Buildings, somewhat unexpectedly to the Middle Temple,
but they have no immediate connection with Oliver Goldsmith.
The bedroom in Goldsmith’s Chambers Thackeray describes as a mere
closet, but he commented upon the excellence of the carved woodwork in
the rooms. The windows looked upon a rookery, which for long flourished
in the elm-trees, since cut down, which gave their name to Elm Court.
Gazing upon this colony, Goldsmith, in the intervals of composing his
‘Traveller’ or ‘Deserted Village,’ would note their ways, and so
recorded them in his ‘Animated Nature’:[35] ‘The rook builds in the
neighbourhood of man, and sometimes makes choice of groves in the very
midst of cities for the place of its retreat and security. In these it
establishes a kind of legal constitution, by which all intruders are
excluded from coming to live among them, and none suffered to build but
acknowledged natives of the place. I have often amused myself with
observing their plan of policy from my window in the Temple, that looks
upon a grove where they have made a colony in the midst of the City....’
In recent years many of the brightest ornaments of the English Bar have
had Chambers in Brick Court, including Lord Coleridge, Lord Bowen, Lord
Russell, and Sir William Anson. There is a sundial in this Court--one of
the many for which the Inn is famous--from which Goldsmith may often
have taken the hour. It warns us that Time and Tide tarry for no man,
and took the place (1704) of one that bore the motto, ‘Begone about your
business,’ of which the story goes that it was a Bencher’s curt
dismissal of a Mason who asked him for the motto to be engraved thereon.
The Buildings in the Inns grew up in haphazard fashion. They were
erected by individual members or Benchers at their own cost, and
interspersed with stalls and shops, with the sanction of the Benchers.
The builders were granted the right of calling their blocks of chambers
after their own names, if they chose, and of nominating a certain number
of successors from among members of the Society, who might become
tenants without paying rent to the Inn.
To this haphazard method of building, and to the influence of numerous
fires, is due the devious labyrinth of little Courts, the inextricable
maze of blocks of Chambers, which lie upon our left as we descend Middle
Temple Lane, and which lend so peculiar a character to the Temple Inns.
Pump Court, Elm Court, Fig-Tree Court, which fill the spaces between the
Lane and Wren’s Cloisters and the Inner Temple Hall, owe their irregular
shape to these causes, and their titles to the chief features of the
plots about which they were built.
First comes Pump Court, where Henry Fielding, the novelist, and Cowper,
the poet, once had chambers. Upon its old brick walls is a sundial with
its warning motto: ‘Shadows we are, and like shadows depart.’[36] The
great fire of 1679, which damaged the Middle Temple far more than the
Fire of London, broke out at midnight in Pump Court. It raged for twelve
hours. The Thames was frozen, and barrels of ale, so tradition runs,
were broached to feed the pumping engines in lieu of water. Pump Court,
Elm-Tree Court, Vine Court, the Cloisters, and part of Brick Court were
consumed. The Church and Middle Temple Hall were only saved by the
timely use of gunpowder, a device that had been found effective in the
Great Fire of 1666.
Elm Court Buildings, as they now are, date from 1880. They are built of
good red brick and stone, but marred by feeble Renaissance ornament.
They boast a sundial, facing the Lane, which proclaims that the years
pass and are reckoned--_pereunt et imputantur_. The Middle Temple Lane
ends in the atrocities of the nineteenth century: between the walls of
the feeble Harcourt Buildings, the stock-brick ugliness of Plowden
Buildings, which have rather less architectural charm than a
soap-factory, and in the dreadful Temple Gardens and the Gateway which
opens upon the Embankment, a gross abomination of florid ugliness.
On the right, below Brick Court, beneath a gas-lamp raised upon a
graceful iron arch, some steps
[Illustration: FOUNTAIN COURT AND MIDDLE TEMPLE HALL]
lead us to a raised pavement, dotted with a few plane-trees, beyond
which lies the Fountain. This pavement is the forecourt of the Middle
Temple Hall, a building which, in spite of restorations and recasings
and counter-restorations, remains of unique and unsurpassed interest.
For now that Crosby Hall is to be translated, it is the only building
left _in situ_ in London which can be directly and certainly connected
with William Shakespeare. The Middle Temples had an ancient Hall between
Pump Court and Elm Court, the west end of which abutted upon Middle
Temple Lane. This was superseded in 1572 by the present famous building.
‘Gray’s Inn for walks,
Lincoln’s Inn for a wall,
The Inner Temple for a garden,
And the Middle for a Hall.’
The old doggerel lines fairly sum up the features of the Inns. And this
lovely Hall of the Middle Temple, whose proportions are so fair--it is
100 feet by 42 feet by 47 feet high--produces a delightful impression of
space and lightness. A magnificent timber roof with Elizabethan
hammer-beams harmonizes with the rich panelling, on which are painted
the arms of ‘Readers,’ and the gorgeous carving of the Renaissance
Screen, which was erected in 1574, some fourteen years before the date
of the Spanish Armada, from the spoils of which fond tradition says it
was constructed.
The Hall is very rich in heraldry, and has some interesting portraits,
chiefly of royal personages. Above the Bench Table hangs Van Dyck’s
portrait of Charles I. The windows illustrate the survival of Gothic
detail long after other details had passed into the Italian style. The
points are very slight, but contrast sharply enough with the Renaissance
curves and pendent roof. There is some modern stained glass, tolerable
in colour, but incongruous in style.
Parliament Chamber and the Benchers’ rooms are approached through old
carved oak doors, relics of the old Hall in Pump Court.
The Entrance Tower was designed by Savage (1831): the Louvre was
restored by Hakewill. An oil-painting, attributed to Hogarth, of the
Hall Court, with the Entrance Tower of the Hall in its ancient state, is
to be seen in the Benchers’ Committee Room of the Inner Temple.
One of the most splendid Refectories in England, comparable to the Hall
of Christ Church at Oxford, this noble room adds to the charm of its
beauty the charm of a literary memorial. For from this stage the
exquisite poetry and gentle fun of Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’ first
fell upon the ears of the listening lawyers upon occasion of a Christmas
Revel three hundred years ago. Here Shakespeare himself, we must
believe, has trodden; those rafters rang once with the poet’s voice. For
even if he did not act himself in his play that night of wonderful
Post-Revels--and that, in spite of tradition, is indeed scarcely
probable, for the dramas performed on these occasions were, as we have
seen, acted by members of the Inn--yet it is more than probable that he
would be employed as Stage-Manager for the occasion, and would take his
natural part in rehearsing the play.
It so happens that one John Manningham--a fellow-student, by the way, of
John Pym--kept a diary of his residence in the Temple from 1601 to 1603.
That diary has been preserved among the Harleian Manuscripts now in the
British Museum. And on February, 160½, he made a note which will cause
his name to live for ever. ‘At our feast,’ he wrote, ‘Wee had a play
called “Twelve Night, or What you will,” much like the “Commedy of
Errores,” or “Menechmi” in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in
Italian called “Inganni.”[37]
And to this stately Hall, we may be sure, came Elizabeth, surrounded by
a brilliant group of statesmen, lawyers, sailors, to witness such plays,
or perchance to lead the dance with some comely courtier like Sir
Christopher Hatton. The connection of the Middle Temple with the great
Elizabethan Admirals and Adventurers is indeed noteworthy.
Sir Francis Drake was honourably received by the Benchers in this Hall
after his victories in the West Indies (1586), and in the Hall, below
the daïs, is a serving-table made out of the timber of his ship, the
_Golden Hind_. He had been admitted, _honoris causa_, to the Society of
the Inner Temple four years earlier. Other famous Elizabethan seamen
were admitted at the Middle Temple in the persons of Sir Martin
Frobisher, Admiral Norris, Sir Francis Vere (all in 1592), and Sir John
Hawkins (1594). Taken in conjunction with the fact that Richard Hakluyt,
the elder, was a Bencher of the Middle Temple; that Sir Walter Raleigh,
who had been admitted to membership of the Inn in 1575, placed the
expedition he sent out in 1602 under the command of Bartholomew Gosnold,
another Middle Templar; that the records show that several members of
the Middle Temple were interested in the early development of Virginia;
and that the Inn possesses the only existing copy of the ‘Molyneux
Globes,’ this and other indications seem to justify Mr. Bedwell’s
contention[38] that ‘the colonizing enterprises of the closing years of
the sixteenth century were closely associated with the Middle Temple,’
and that on both sides of the Atlantic members of that Inn took a
prominent part in the ‘birth of the American Nation.’
This connection with the Colonies, natural, necessary and profitable
both to those new countries, which thus obtained the services of
educated men--Governors trained in knowledge of affairs, and
Attorney-Generals imbued with the high traditions of English Law--and to
the Inns themselves, which were thus kept in touch with the New World,
is illustrated by the fact that the Middle Temple is represented by no
less than five of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence. Of
these, Thomas McKean is said to have written the Constitution of
Delaware in a single night. And of the other four, Edward Rutledge,
Thomas Lynch, Thomas Heyward, and Arthur Midleton--all Representatives
of South Carolina--the first is believed to have drafted the greater
part of the Constitution of that State, and was afterwards Chairman of
the Committee of Five who drafted the first Constitution of the United
States.
Meanwhile the literary and dramatic tradition of the Middle Temple was
continued by such members of the Society as Congreve, Wycherley, Ford,
Sir Thomas Overbury, and Shadwell, King William’s Poet Laureate, who
lives in Dryden’s Satire. Later, that tradition was continued by
Sheridan, Thomas Moore, Thomas de Quincey, and Henry Hallam, the
historian of the Middle Ages.
Since 1688, when a change was made in the oath of supremacy, which, by a
statute of 1563, all Utter Barristers were required to take, the names
of the members of the Inns of Court who are entitled to practise in the
Courts have been preserved in the Barristers’ Roll. Since 1868
barristers have been excused the oath, but the Roll must still be signed
after call to the Bar. The lists are kept in the Public Record Office.
The names of eminence inscribed upon this wonderful Roll can only be
hinted at here. The Middle Temple can boast such great lawyers as Edmund
Plowden and Blackstone, and Lord Chancellors in Clarendon, Jeffreys (who
was a student here, but called to the Bar at the Inner Temple), Somers,
Cowper, and Eldon; whilst Mansfield, C.J., Lord Ashburton, Robert
Gifford, Lord Stowell, Lord Campbell, Cockburn, the Norths, and the
Pollocks, were men and lawyers of no less eminence. Nor must we omit to
mention one whose undying fame was earned, not in the Courts, but in the
Camp; for Sir Henry Havelock, the hero of Cawnpore and Lucknow, figured
among the Templars ere he went to India. Of another kind of eminence was
Elias Ashmole, the Antiquary, whose name lives at Oxford. In the
destructive fire of 1678 he lost in his rooms at the Middle Temple his
papers, books, and rich collection of coins and medals. His friend, John
Evelyn, the diarist, also had rooms in the Middle Temple, in Essex
Court, just over against the Hall Court (1640).
The north wing of Essex Court, which forms part of Brick Court, was
rebuilt in 1883;[39] the remainder of these charming brick buildings,
with the Wigmaker’s shop, belong to the second half of the seventeenth
century.
Though the Gateway which leads to Middle Temple Lane is the grander,
there is another entrance by ‘the little Gate,’ which is still more
charming and characteristic. Screened by the tortuous ways of Devereux
Court, an old wrought-iron gate opens onto an ancient and spacious
quadrangle.
As we stand beneath the old brick buildings of this ‘New Court’--so
‘new’ that it was built by Sir Christopher Wren (1677)--the whole charm
of the Temple scenery unfolds before our eyes, and we understand at once
the ‘cheerful, liberal look of it’ which Charles Lamb loved.
For below us lies the most unique and one of the loveliest views in
London, a city of beautiful vistas. A flight of steps, framed by ancient
iron standards bearing the sign of the Lamb, leads down to a Fountain in
the centre of a broad paved terrace. And through the trees that shade it
we catch glimpses of green lawns and flower-beds hedged about by Hall
and Library and Chambers. Here still, beneath the shady trees--though
Goldsmith’s rooks no longer caw in them--sparkles the water of the
Temple Fountain, though the Fountain itself is not that which provoked
Lamb’s wit, nor that which Dickens loved. It was through the smoky
shrubs of Fountain Court that the delicate figure of Ruth Pinch flitted,
in fulfilment of her little plot of assignation with Tom, who was always
to come out of the Temple past the Fountain and look for her ‘down the
steps leading into Garden Court,’ to be greeted ‘with the best little
laugh upon her face that ever played in opposition to the Fountain, and
beat it all to nothing. The Temple Fountain might have leaped twenty
feet to greet the spring of hopeful maidenhood that in her person stole
on, sparkling, through the dry and dusty channels of the Law; the
chirping sparrows, bred in Temple chinks and crannies, might have held
their peace to listen to imaginary skylarks, as so fresh a little
creature passed; the dingy boughs, unused to droop, otherwise than in
their puny growth, might have bent down in a kindred gracefulness, to
shed their benedictions on her graceful head; old love letters, shut up
in iron boxes in the neighbouring offices, and made of no account among
the heaps of family papers into which they had strayed, and of which, in
their degeneracy, they formed a part, might have stirred and fluttered
with a moment’s recollection of their ancient tenderness, as she went
lightly by.’[40]
From the Fountain Terrace we look down upon a terraced garden framed by
various blocks of buildings, which, if they do not group and harmonize
so as to form a perfect whole, yet produce an effect which is quite
singular and has a charm of its own. Beneath the Terrace, on the left
the west end of the Hall abuts upon a green lawn; on the right a flight
of steps leads down to a path which skirts the not unpleasing gabled
façade, in red brick and stone, of the Garden Court (1883). Facing us
now, are the steps which lead up to the embattled Lobby of the Library,
beneath which an archway leads to the Library Chambers facing Milford
Lane. Hence a private gate leads out into the Lane, where are the steps
to Essex Street, remains of the old Water Gate of Essex House. The
left-hand side of the green parallelogram of garden is formed by those
ugly Plowden Buildings, for which the only hope is that they may soon be
buried in the decent obscurity of Virginia Creeper, which can cover a
multitude of architectural sins, and the still uglier Temple Gardens,
and the Gateway, for which there is no hope at all.
In Dugdale’s time the Middle Temple Library, owing to the fact that it
always stood open, had been completely despoiled of books. The present
[Illustration: MIDDLE TEMPLE LIBRARY
ON the left are the buttresses of Middle Temple Hall.]
building, in the Gothic style by H. R. Abraham, is ugly in itself, its
proportions, especially when viewed from the Embankment, being painfully
bad. Its height is far too great for its length and breadth, and this is
due to the fact that two stories of offices and chambers are beneath the
Library Room, which is approached by a charming outside staircase. The
Library itself, which is 86 feet long, is a beautiful room with a fine
open hammer-beam roof. It was opened on October 31, 1861, by King Edward
VII., then Prince of Wales, who was called to the Bar and admitted as a
Bencher of the Middle Temple on the same day.