TEMPLE BAR.
Temple Bar--The Golgotha of English Traitors--When Temple Bar was
made of Wood--Historical Pageants at Temple Bar--The Associations of
Temple Bar--Mischievous Processions through Temple Bar--The First
grim Trophy--Rye-House Plot Conspirators.
Temple Bar was rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren, in 1670-72, soon after
the Great Fire had swept away eighty-nine London churches, four out of
the seven City gates, 460 streets, and 13,200 houses, and had destroyed
fifteen of the twenty-six wards, and laid waste 436 acres of buildings,
from the Tower eastward to the Inner Temple westward.
The old black gateway, once the dreaded Golgotha of English traitors,
separates, it should be remembered, the Strand from Fleet Street, the
city from the shire, and the Freedom of the City of London from the
Liberty of the City of Westminster. As Hatton (1708--Queen Anne)
says,--"This gate opens not immediately into the City itself, but into
the Liberty or Freedom thereof." We need hardly say that nothing can be
more erroneous than the ordinary London supposition that Temple Bar ever
formed part of the City fortifications. Mr. Gilbert a Beckett, laughing
at this tradition, once said in _Punch_: "Temple Bar has always seemed
to me a weak point in the fortifications of London. Bless you, the
besieging army would never stay to bombard it--they would dash through
the barber's."
The Great Fire never reached nearer Temple Bar than the Inner Temple, on
the south side of Fleet Street, and St. Dunstan's Church, on the north.
The Bar is of Portland stone, which London smoke alternately blackens
and calcines; and each facade has four Corinthian pilasters, an
entablature, and an arched pediment. On the west (Strand) side, in two
niches, stand, as eternal sentries, Charles I. and Charles II., in Roman
costume. Charles I. has long ago lost his baton, as he once deliberately
lost his head. Over the keystone of the central arch there used to be
the royal arms. On the east side are James I. and Elizabeth (by many
able writers supposed to be Anne of Denmark, James I.'s queen). She is
pointing her white finger at Child's; while he, looking down on the
passing cabs, seems to say, "I am nearly tired of standing; suppose we
go to Whitehall, and sit down a bit?"
The slab over the eastern side of the arch bears the following
inscription, now all but smoothed down by time:--
"Erected in the year 1670, Sir Samuel Starling, Mayor; continued in
the year 1671, Sir Richard Ford, Lord Mayor; and finished in the
year, 1672, Sir George Waterman, Lord Mayor."
All these persons were friends of Pepys.
The upper part of the Bar is flanked by scrolls, but the fruit and
flowers once sculptured on the pediment, and the supporters of the royal
arms over the posterns, have crumbled away. In the centre of each facade
is a semicircular-headed, ecclesiastical-looking window, that casts a
dim horny light into a room above the gate, held of the City, at an
annual rent of some L50, by Messrs. Childs, the bankers, as a sort of
muniment-room for their old account-books. There is here preserved,
among other costlier treasures of Mammon, the private account-book of
Charles II. The original Child was a friend of Pepys, and is mentioned
by him as quarrelling with the Duke of York on Admiralty matters. The
Child who succeeded him was a friend of Pope, and all but led him into
the South-Sea Bubble speculation.
Those affected, mean statues, with the crinkly drapery, were the work of
a vain, half-crazed sculptor named John Bushnell, who died mad in 1701.
Bushnell, who had visited Rome and Venice, executed Cowley's monument in
Westminster Abbey, and the statues of Charles I., Charles II., and
Gresham, in the Old Exchange.
There is no extant historical account of Temple Bar in which the
following passage from Strype (George I.) is not to be found embedded
like a fossil; it is, in fact, nearly all we London topographers know of
the early history of the Bar:--"Anciently," says Strype, "there were
only posts, rails, and a chain, such as are now in Holborn, Smithfield,
and Whitechapel bars. Afterwards there was a house of timber erected
across the street, with a narrow gateway and an entry on the south side
of it under the house." This structure is to be seen in the bird's-eye
view of London, 1601 (Elizabeth), and in Hollar's seven-sheet map of
London (Charles II.)
The date of the erection of the "wooden house" is not to be ascertained;
but there is the house plain enough in a view of London to which
Maitland affixes the date about 1560 (the second year of Elizabeth), so
we may perhaps safely put it down as early as Edward VI. or Henry VIII.
Indeed, if a certain scrap of history is correct--_i.e._, that bluff
King Hal once threatened, if a certain Bill did not pass the Commons a
little quicker, to fix the heads of several refractory M.P.s on the top
of Temple Bar--we must suppose the old City toll-gate to be as old as
the early Tudors.
After Simon de Montfort's death, at the battle of Evesham, 1265, Prince
Edward, afterwards Edward I., punished the rebellious Londoners, who had
befriended Montfort, by taking away all their street chains and bars,
and locking them up in the Tower.
The earliest known documentary and historical notice of Temple Bar is in
1327, the first year of Edward III.; and in the thirty-fourth year of
the same reign we find, at an inquisition before the mayor, twelve
witnesses deposing that the commonalty of the City had, time out of
mind, had free ingress and egress from the City to Thames and from
Thames to the City, through the great gate of the Templars situate
within Temple Bar. This referred to some dispute about the right of way
through the Temple, built in the reign of Henry I. In 1384 Richard II.
granted a licence for paving Strand Street from Temple Bar to the Savoy,
and collecting tolls to cover such charges.
[Illustration: PROCLAMATION OF CHARLES II. AT TEMPLE BAR (_see page
26_).]
The historical pageants that have taken place at Temple Bar deserve a
notice, however short. On the 5th of November, 1422, the corpse of that
brave and chivalrous king, the hero of Agincourt, Henry V., was borne to
its rest at Westminster Abbey by the chief citizens and nobles, and
every doorway from Southwark to Temple Bar had its mournful
torch-bearer. In 1502-3 the hearse of Elizabeth of York, queen of Henry
VII., halted at Temple Bar, on its way from the Tower to Westminster,
and at the Bar the Abbots of Westminster and Bermondsey blessed the
corpse, and the Earl of Derby and a large company of nobles joined the
sable funeral throng. After sorrow came joy, and after joy sorrow--_Ita
vita_. In the next reign poor Anne Boleyn, radiant with happiness and
triumph, came through the Bar (May 31, 1534), on her way to the Tower,
to be welcomed by the clamorous citizens, the day before her ill-starred
coronation. Temple Bar on that occasion was new painted and repaired,
and near it stood singing men and children--the Fleet Street conduit all
the time running claret. The old gate figures more conspicuously the day
before the coronation of that wondrous child, Edward VI. Two hogsheads
of wine were then ladled out to the thirsty mob, and the gate at Temple
Bar was painted with battlements and buttresses, richly hung with cloth
of Arras, and all in a flutter with "fourteen standard flags." There
were eight French trumpeters blowing their best, besides "a pair of
regals," with children singing to the same. In September, 1553, when
Edward's cold-hearted half-sister, Mary Tudor, came through the City,
according to ancient English custom, the day before her coronation,
she did not ride on horseback, as Edward had done, but sat in a chariot
covered with cloth of tissue and drawn by six horses draped with the
same. Minstrels piped and trumpeted at Ludgate, and Temple Bar was newly
painted and hung.
[Illustration: PENANCE OF THE DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER (_see page 32_).]
Old Temple Bar, the background to many historical scenes, figures in the
rash rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt. When he had fought his way down
Piccadilly to the Strand, Temple Bar was thrown open to him, or forced
open by him; but when he had been repulsed at Ludgate he was hemmed in
by cavalry at Temple Bar, where he surrendered. This foolish revolt led
to the death of innocent Lady Jane Grey, and brought sixty brave
gentlemen to the scaffold and the gallows.
On Elizabeth's procession from the Tower before her coronation, January,
1559, Gogmagog the Albion, and Corineus the Briton, the two Guildhall
giants, stood on the Bar; and on the south side there were chorister
lads, one of whom, richly attired as a page, bade the queen farewell in
the name of the whole City. In 1588, the glorious year that the Armada
was defeated, Elizabeth passed through the Bar on her way to return
thanks to God solemnly at St. Paul's. The City waits stood in triumph
on the roof of the gate. The Lord Mayor and Aldermen, in scarlet gowns,
welcomed the queen and delivered up the City sword, then on her return
they took horse and rode before her. The City Companies lined the north
side of the street, the lawyers and gentlemen of the Inns of Court the
south. Among the latter stood a person afterwards not altogether
unknown, one Francis Bacon, who displayed his wit by saying to a friend,
"Mark the courtiers! Those who bow first to the citizens are in debt;
those who bow first to us are at law!"
In 1601, when the Earl of Essex made his insane attempt to rouse the
City to rebellion, Temple Bar, we are told, was thrown open to him; but
Ludgate being closed against him on his retreat from Cheapside, he came
back by boat to Essex House, where he surrendered after a short and
useless resistance.
King James made his first public entry into his royal City of London,
with his consort and son Henry, upon the 15th of March, 1603-4. The king
was mounted upon a white genet, ambling through the crowded streets
under a canopy held by eight gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, as
representatives of the Barons of the Cinque Ports, and passed under six
arches of triumph, to take his leave at the Temple of Janus, erected for
the occasion at Temple Bar. This edifice was fifty-seven feet high,
proportioned in every respect like a temple.
In June, 1649 (the year of the execution of Charles), Cromwell and the
Parliament dined at Guildhall in state, and the mayor, says Whitelocke,
delivered up the sword to the Speaker, at Temple Bar, as he had before
done to King Charles.
Philips, Milton's nephew, who wrote the continuation of Baker's
Chronicle, describes the ceremony at Temple Bar on the proclamation of
Charles II. The old oak gates being shut, the king-at-arms, with tabard
on and trumpet before him, knocked and gravely demanded entrance. The
Lord Mayor appointed some one to ask who knocked. The king-at-arms
replied, that if they would open the wicket, and let the Lord Mayor come
thither, he would to him deliver his message. The Lord Mayor then
appeared, tremendous in crimson velvet gown, and on horseback, of all
things in the world, the trumpets sounding as the gallant knight pricked
forth to demand of the herald, who he was and what was his message. The
bold herald, with his hat on, answered, regardless of Lindley Murray,
who was yet unknown, "We are the herald-at-arms appointed and commanded
by the Lords and Commons assembled in Parliament, and demand an entrance
into the famous City of London, to proclaim Charles II. King of England,
Scotland, France, and Ireland, and we expect your speedy answer to our
demand." An alderman then replied, "The message is accepted," and the
gates were thrown open.
When William III. came to see the City and the Lord Mayor's Show in
1689, the City militia, holding lighted flambeaux, lined Fleet Street as
far as Temple Bar.
The shadow of every monarch and popular hero since Charles II.'s time
has rested for at least a passing moment at the old gateway. Queen Anne
passed here to return thanks at St. Paul's for the victory of Blenheim.
Here Marlborough's coach ominously broke down in 1714, when he returned
in triumph from his voluntary exile.
George III. passed through Temple Bar, young and happy, the year after
his coronation, and again when, old and almost broken-hearted, he
returned thanks for his partial recovery from insanity; and in our time
that graceless son of his, the Prince Regent, came through the Bar in
1814, to thank God at St. Paul's for the downfall of Bonaparte.
On the 9th November, 1837, the accession of Queen Victoria, Alderman
Kelly, picturesque in scarlet gown, Spanish hat, and black feathers,
presented the City sword to the Queen at Temple Bar; Alderman Cowan was
ready with the same weapon in 1844, when the Queen opened the new Royal
Exchange; but in 1851, when her Majesty once more visited the City, the
old ceremony was (wrongly, we think) dispensed with.
At the funeral of Lord Nelson, the honoured corpse, followed by downcast
old sailors, was met at the Bar by the Lord Mayor and the Corporation;
and the Great Duke's funeral car, and the long train of representative
soldiers, rested at the Bar, which was hung with black velvet.
A few earlier associations connected with the present Bar deserve a
moment or two's recollection. On February 12th, when General
Monk--"Honest George," as his old Cromwellian soldiers used to call
him--entered London, dislodged the "Rump" Parliament, and prepared for
the Restoration of Charles II., bonfires were lit, the City bells rung,
and London broke into a sudden flame of joy. Pepys, walking homeward
about ten o'clock, says:--"The common joy was everywhere to be seen. The
number of bonfires--there being fourteen between St. Dunstan's and
Temple Bar, and at Strand Bridge, east of Catherine Street, I could at
one time tell thirty-one fires."
On November 17, 1679, the year after the sham Popish Plot concocted by
those matchless scoundrels, Titus Oates, an expelled naval chaplain, and
Bedloe, a swindler and thief, Temple Bar was made the spot for a great
mob pilgrimage, on the anniversary of the accession of Queen Elizabeth.
The ceremonial is supposed to have been organised by that restless
plotter against a Popish succession, Lord Shaftesbury, and the gentlemen
of the Green Ribbon Club, whose tavern, the "King's Head," was at the
corner of Chancery Lane, opposite the Inner Temple gate. To scare and
vex the Papists, the church bells began to clash out as early as three
o'clock on the morning of that dangerous day. At dusk the procession of
several thousand half-crazed torch-bearers started from Moorgate, along
Bishopsgate Street, and down Houndsditch and Aldgate (passing
Shaftesbury's house imagine the roar of the monster mob, the wave of
torches, and the fiery fountains of squibs at that point!), then through
Leadenhall Street and Cornhill, by the Royal Exchange, along Cheapside
and on to Temple Bar, where the bonfire awaited the puppets. In a
torrent of fire the noisy Protestants passed through the exulting City,
making the Papists cower and shudder in their garrets and cellars, and
before the flaming deluge opened a storm of shouting people. This
procession consisted of fifteen groups of priests, Jesuits, and friars,
two following a man on a horse, holding up before him a dummy, dressed
to represent Sir Edmondbury Godfrey, a Protestant justice and wood
merchant, supposed to have been murdered by Roman Catholics at Somerset
House. It was attended by a body-guard of 150 swordbearers and a man
roaring a political cry of the time through a brazen speaking-trumpet.
The great bonfire was built up mountain high opposite the Inner Temple
gate. Some zealous Protestants, by pre-arrangement, had crowned the prim
and meagre statue of Elizabeth (still on the east side of the Bar) with
a wreath of gilt laurel, and placed under her hand (that now points to
Child's Bank) a golden glistening shield, with the motto, "The
Protestant Religion and Magna Charta," inscribed upon it. Several
lighted torches were stuck before her niche. Lastly, amidst a fiery
shower of squibs from every door and window, the Pope and his companions
were toppled into the huge bonfire, with shouts that reached almost to
Charing Cross.
These mischievous processions were continued till the reign of George I.
There was to have been a magnificent one on November 17, 1711, when the
Whigs were dreading the contemplated peace with the French and the
return of Marlborough. But the Tories, declaring that the Kit-Kat Club
was urging the mob to destroy the house of Harley, the Minister, and to
tear him to pieces, seized on the wax figures in Drury Lane, and forbade
the ceremony.
As early as two years after the Restoration, Sir Balthazar Gerbier, a
restless architectural quack and adventurer of those days, wrote a
pamphlet proposing a sumptuous gate at Temple Bar, and the levelling of
the Fleet Valley. After the Great Fire Charles II. himself hurried the
erection of the Bar, and promised money to carry out the work. During
the Great Fire, Temple Bar was one of the stations for constables, 100
firemen, and 30 soldiers.
The Rye-House Plot brought the first trophy to the Golgotha of the Bar,
in 1684, twelve years after its erection. Sir Thomas Armstrong was deep
in the scheme. If the discreditable witnesses examined against Lord
William Russell are to be believed, a plot had been concocted by a few
desperate men to assassinate "the Blackbird and the Goldfinch"--as the
conspirators called the King and the Duke of York--as they were in their
coach on their way from Newmarket to London. This plan seems to have
been the suggestion of Rumbold, a maltster, who lived in a lonely moated
farmhouse, called Rye House, about eighteen miles from London, near the
river Ware, close to a by-road that leads from Bishop Stortford to
Hoddesdon. Charles II. had a violent hatred to Armstrong, who had been
his Gentleman of the Horse, and was supposed to have incited his
illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, to rebellion. Sir Thomas was
hanged at Tyburn. After the body had hung half an hour, the hangman cut
it down, stripped it, lopped off the head, threw the heart into a fire,
and divided the body into four parts. The fore-quarter (after being
boiled in pitch at Newgate) was set on Temple Bar, the head was placed
on Westminster Hall, and the rest of the body was sent to Stafford,
which town Sir Thomas represented in Parliament.
Eleven years after, the heads of two more traitors--this time
conspirators against William III.--joined the relic of Armstrong. Sir
John Friend was a rich brewer at Aldgate. Parkyns was an old
Warwickshire county gentleman. The plotters had several plans. One was
to attack Kensington Palace at night, scale the outer wall, and storm or
fire the building; another was to kill William on a Sunday, as he drove
from Kensington to the chapel at St. James's Palace. The murderers
agreed to assemble near where Apsley House now stands. Just as the royal
coach passed from Hyde Park across to the Green Park, thirty
conspirators agreed to fall on the twenty-five guards, and butcher the
king before he could leap out of his carriage. These two Jacobite
gentlemen died bravely, proclaiming their entire loyalty to King James
and the "Prince of Wales."
The unfortunate gentlemen who took a moody pleasure in drinking "the
squeezing of the rotten Orange" had long passed on their doleful journey
from Newgate to Tyburn before the ghastly procession of the brave and
unlucky men of the rising in 1715 began its mournful march.[1]
Sir Bernard Burke mentions a tradition that the head of the young Earl
of Derwentwater was exposed on Temple Bar in 1716, and that his wife
drove in a cart under the arch while a man hired for the purpose threw
down to her the beloved head from the parapet above. But the story is
entirely untrue, and is only a version of the way in which the head of
Sir Thomas More was removed by his son-in-law and daughter from London
Bridge, where that cruel tyrant Henry VIII. had placed it. Some years
ago, when the Earl of Derwentwater's coffin was found in the family
vault, the head was lying safe with the body. In 1716 there was,
however, a traitor's head spiked on the Bar--that of Colonel John
Oxburgh, the victim of mistaken fidelity to a bad cause. He was a brave
Lancashire gentleman, who had surrendered with his forces at Preston. He
displayed signal courage and resignation in prison, forgetting himself
to comfort others.
The next victim was Mr. Christopher Layer, a young Norfolk man and a
Jacobite barrister, living in Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane. He
plunged deeply into the Atterbury Plot of 1722, and, with Lords North
and Grey, enlisted men, hired officers, and, taking advantage of the
universal misery caused by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, planned
a general rising against George I. The scheme was, with four distinct
bodies of Jacobites, to seize the Tower and the Bank, to arrest the king
and the prince, and capture or kill Lord Cadogan, one of the Ministers.
At the trial it was proved that Layer had been over to Rome, and had
seen the Pretender, who, by proxy, had stood godfather to his child.
Troops were to be sent from France; barricades were to be thrown up all
over London. The Jacobites had calculated that the Government had only
14,000 men to meet them--3,000 of these would be wanted to guard London,
3,000 for Scotland, and 2,000 for the garrisons. The original design had
been to take advantage of the king's departure for Hanover, and, in the
words of one of the conspirators, the Jacobites were fully convinced
that "they should walk King George out before Lady-day." Layer was
hanged at Tyburn, and his head fixed upon Temple Bar.
Years after, one stormy night in 1753, the rebel's skull blew down, and
was picked up by a non-juring attorney, named Pierce, who preserved it
as a relic of the Jacobite martyr. It is said that Dr. Richard
Rawlinson, an eminent antiquary, obtained what he thought was Layer's
head, and desired in his will that it should be placed in his right hand
when he was buried. Another version of the story is, that a spurious
skull was foisted upon Rawlinson, who died happy in the possession of
the doubtful treasure. Rawlinson was bantered by Addison for his
pedantry, in one of the _Tatlers_, and was praised by Dr. Johnson for
his learning.
The 1745 rebellion brought the heads of fresh victims to the Bar, and
this was the last triumph of barbarous justice. Colonel Francis
Townley's was the sixth head; Fletcher's (his fellow-officer), the
seventh and last. The Earls of Kilmarnock and Cromarty, Lord Balmerino,
and thirty-seven other rebels (thirty-six of them having been captured
in Carlisle) were tried the same session. Townley was a man of about
fifty-four years of age, nephew of Mr. Townley of Townley Hall, in
Lancashire (the "Townley Marbles" family), who had been tried and
acquitted in 1715, though many of his men were found guilty and
executed. The nephew had gone over to France in 1727, and obtained a
commission from the French king, whom he served for fifteen years, being
at the siege of Philipsburg, and close to the Duke of Berwick when that
general's head was shot off. About 1740, Townley stole over to England
to see his friends and to plot against the Hanover family; and as soon
as the rebels came into England, he met them between Lancaster and
Preston, and came with them to Manchester. At the trial Roger M'Donald,
an officer's servant, deposed to seeing Townley on the retreat from
Derby, and between Lancaster and Preston riding at the head of the
Manchester regiment on a bay horse. He had a white cockade in his hat
and wore a plaid sash.
George Fletcher, who was tried at the same time as Townley, was a rash
young chapman, who managed his widowed mother's provision shop "at
Salford, just over the bridge in Manchester." His mother had begged him
on her knees to keep out of the rebellion, even offering him a thousand
pounds for his own pocket, if he would stay at home. He bought a
captain's commission of Murray, the Pretender's secretary, for fifty
pounds; wore the smart white cockade and a Highland plaid sash lined
with white silk; and headed the very first captain's guard mounted for
the Pretender at Carlisle. A Manchester man deposed to seeing at the
Exchange a sergeant, with a drum, beating up for volunteers for the
Manchester regiment.
Fletcher, Townley, and seven other unfortunate Jacobites were hanged on
Kennington Common. Before the carts drove away, the men flung their
prayer-books, written speeches, and gold-laced hats gaily to the crowd.
Mr. James (Jemmy) Dawson, the hero of Shenstone's touching ballad, was
one of the nine. As soon as they were dead the hangman cut down the
bodies, disembowelled, beheaded, and quartered them, throwing the hearts
into the fire. A monster--a fighting-man of the day, named Buckhorse--is
said to have actually eaten a piece of Townley's flesh, to show his
loyalty. Before the ghastly scene was over, the heart of one unhappy
spectator had already broken. The lady to whom James Dawson was engaged
to be married followed the rebels to the common, and even came near
enough to see, with pallid face, the fire kindling, the axe, the
coffins, and all the other dreadful preparations. She bore up bravely,
until she heard her lover was no more. Then she drew her head back into
the coach, and crying out, "My dear, I follow thee--I follow thee! Lord
God, receive our souls, I pray Thee!" fell on the neck of a companion
and expired. Mr. Dawson had behaved gallantly in prison, saying, "He did
not care if they put a ton weight of iron upon him, it would not daunt
him."
A curious old print of 1746, full of vulgar triumph, reproduces a
"Temple Bar, the City Golgotha," representing the Bar with three heads
on the top of it, spiked on long iron rods. The devil looks down in
ribald triumph from above, and waves a rebel banner, on which, besides
three coffins and a crown, is the motto, "A crown or a grave."
Underneath are written these patriotic but doggrel lines:--
"Observe the banner which would all enslave,
Which misled traytors did so proudly wave:
The devil seems the project to surprise;
A fiend confused from off the trophy flies.
While trembling rebels at the fabric gaze,
And dread their fate with horror and amaze,
Let Britain's sons the emblematic view,
And plainly see what is rebellion's due."
The heads of Fletcher and Townley were put on the Bar August 12, 1746.
On August 15th Horace Walpole, writing to a friend, says he had just
been roaming in the City, and "passed under the new heads on Temple Bar,
where people make a trade of letting spy-glasses at a halfpenny a look."
According to Mr. J.T. Smith, an old man living in 1825 remembered the
last heads on Temple Bar being visible through a telescope across the
space between the Bar and Leicester Fields.
Between two and three A.M., on the morning of January 20, 1766, a
mysterious man was arrested by the watch as he was discharging, by the
dim light, musket bullets at the two heads then remaining upon Temple
Bar. On being questioned by the puzzled magistrate, he affected a
disorder in his senses, and craftily declared that the patriotic reason
for his eccentric conduct was his strong attachment to the present
Government, and that he thought it not sufficient that a traitor should
merely suffer death; that this provoked his indignation, and it had been
his constant practice for three nights past to amuse himself in the same
manner. "And it is much to be feared," says the past record of the
event, "that the man is a near relation to one of the unhappy
sufferers." Upon searching this very suspicious marksman, about fifty
musket bullets were found on him, wrapped up in a paper on which was
written the motto, "Eripuit ille vitam."
After this, history leaves the heads of the unhappy Jacobites--those
lips that love had kissed, those cheeks children had patted--to moulder
on in the sun and in the rain, till the last day of March, 1772, when
one of them (Townley or Fletcher) fell. The last stormy gust of March
threw it down, and a short time after a strong wind blew down the other;
and against the sky no more relics remained of a barbarous and
unchristian revenge. In April, 1773, Boswell, whom we all despise and
all like, dined at courtly Mr. Beauclerk's with Dr. Johnson, Lord
Charlemont (Hogarth's friend), Sir Joshua Reynolds, and other members of
the literary club, in Gerrard Street, Soho, it being the awful evening
when Boswell was to be balloted for. The conversation turned on the new
and commendable practice of erecting monuments to great men in St.
Paul's. The Doctor observed: "I remember once being with Goldsmith in
Westminster Abbey. Whilst we stood at Poet's Corner, I said to him,--
"Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis."--OVID.
When we got to Temple Bar he stopped me, and pointing to the heads upon
it, slily whispered,--
"Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur _istis_."
This anecdote, so full of clever, arch wit, is sufficient to endear the
old gateway to all lovers of Johnson and of Goldsmith.
According to Mr. Timbs, in his "London and Westminster," Mrs. Black, the
wife of the editor of the _Morning Chronicle_, when asked if she
remembered any heads on Temple Bar, used to reply, in her brusque,
hearty way, "_Boys, I recollect the scene well!_ I have seen on that
Temple Bar, about which you ask, two human heads--real heads--traitors'
heads--spiked on iron poles. There were two; I saw one fall (March 31,
1772). Women shrieked as it fell; men, as I have heard, shrieked. One
woman near me fainted. Yes, boys, I recollect seeing human heads upon
Temple Bar."
The cruel-looking spikes were removed early in the present century. The
panelled oak gates have often been renewed, though certainly shutting
them too often never wore them out.
As early as 1790 Alderman Pickett (who built the St. Clement's arch),
with other subversive reformers, tried to pull down Temple Bar. It was
pronounced unworthy of form, of no antiquity, an ambuscade for
pickpockets, and a record of only the dark and crimson pages of history.
A writer in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, in 1813 chronicling the
clearance away of some hovels encroaching upon the building, says: "It
will not be surprising if certain amateurs, busy in improving the
architectural concerns of the City, should at length request of their
brethren to allow the Bar or grand gate of entrance into the City of
London to stand, after they have so repeatedly sought to obtain its
destruction." In 1852 a proposal for its repair and restoration was
defeated in the Common Council; and twelve months later, a number of
bankers, merchants, and traders set their hands to a petition for its
removal altogether, as serving no practical purpose, as it impeded
ventilation and retarded improvements. Since then Mr. Heywood has
proposed to make a circus at Temple Bar, leaving the archway in the
centre; and Mr. W. Burges, the architect, suggested a new arch in
keeping with the new Law Courts opposite.
[Illustration: THE ROOM OVER TEMPLE BAR (_see page 37_).]
It is a singular fact that the "Parentalia," a chronicle of Wren's works
written by Wren's clever son, contains hardly anything about Temple Bar.
According to Mr. Noble, the Wren manuscripts in the British Museum,
Wren's ledger in the Bodleian, and the Record Office documents, are
equally silent; but from a folio at the Guildhall, entitled "Expenses of
Public Buildings after the Great Fire," it would appear that the Bar
cost altogether L1,397 10s.; Bushnell, the sculptor, receiving out of
this sum L480 for his four stone monarchs. The mason was John Marshall,
who carved the pedestal of the statue of Charles I. at Charing Cross and
worked on the Monument in Fish Street Hill. In 1636 Inigo Jones had
designed a new arch, the plan of which still exists. Wren, it is said,
took his design of the Bar from an old temple at Rome.
The old Bar is now a mere piece of useless and disused armour. Once a
protection, then an ornament, it has now become an obstruction--the
too-narrow neck of a large decanter--a bone in the throat of Fleet
Street. Yet still we have a lingering fondness for the old barrier that
we have seen draped in black for a dead hero and glittering with gold in
honour of a young bride. We have shared the sunshine that brightened it
and the gloom that has darkened it, and we feel for it a species of
friendship, in which it mutely shares. To us there seems to be a dignity
in its dirt and pathos in the mud that bespatters its patient old face,
as, like a sturdy fortress, it holds out against all its enemies, and
Charles I. and II., and Elizabeth and James I. keep a bright look-out
day and night for all attacks. Nevertheless, it must go in time, we
fear. Poor old Temple Bar, we shall miss you when you are gone!
[Illustration: TITUS OATES IN THE PILLORY (_see page 33_).]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Amongst these we must not forget Joseph Sullivan, who was executed
at Tyburn for high treason, for enlisting men in the service of the
Pretender. In the collection of broadsides belonging to the Society of
Antiquaries there is one of great interest, entitled "Perkins against
Perkin, a dialogue between Sir William Perkins and Major Sulliviane, the
two loggerheads upon Temple Bar, concerning the present juncture of
affaires." Date uncertain.