FLEET STREET (NORTHERN TRIBUTARIES--_continued_).
Clifford's Inn--Dyer's Chambers--The Settlement after the Great
Fire--Peter Wilkins and his Flying Wives--Fetter Lane--Waller's Plot
and its Victims--Praise-God Barebone and his Doings--Charles Lamb at
School--Hobbes the Philosopher--A Strange Marriage--Mrs.
Brownrigge--Paul Whitehead--The Moravians--The Record Office and its
Treasures--Rival Poets.
Clifford's Inn, originally a town house of the Lords Clifford, ancestors
of the Earls of Cumberland, given to them by Edward II., was first let
to the students of law in the eighteenth year of King Edward III., at a
time when might was too often right, and hard knocks decided legal
questions oftener than deed or statute. Harrison the regicide was in
youth clerk to an attorney in Clifford's Inn, but when the Civil War
broke out he rode off and joined the Puritan troopers.
Clifford's Inn is the oldest Inn in Chancery. There was formerly, we
learn from Mr. Jay, an office there, out of which were issued writs,
called "Bills of Middlesex," the appointment of which office was in the
gift of the senior judge of the Queen's Bench. "But what made this Inn
once noted was that all the six attorneys of the Marshalsea Court
(better known as the Palace Court) had their chambers there, as also had
the satellites, who paid so much per year for using their names and
looking at the nature of their practice. I should say that more misery
emanated from this small spot than from any one of the most populous
counties in England. The causes in this court were obliged to be tried
in the city of Westminster, near the Palace, and it was a melancholy
sight (except to lawyers) to observe in the court the crowd of every
description of persons suing one another. The most remarkable man in the
court was the extremely fat prothonotary, Mr. Hewlett, who sat under the
judge or the judge's deputy, with a wig on his head like a thrush's
nest, and with only one book before him, which was one of the volumes of
'Burns' Justice.' I knew a respectable gentleman (Mr. G. Dyer) who
resided here in chambers (where he died) over a firm of Marshalsea
attorneys. This gentleman, who wrote a history of Cambridge University
and a biography of Robinson of Cambridge, had been a Bluecoat boy, went
as a Grecian to Cambridge, and, after the University, visited almost
every celebrated library in Europe. It often struck me what a mighty
difference there was between what was going on in the one set of
chambers and the other underneath. At Mr. Dyer's I have seen Sir Walter
Scott, Southey, Coleridge, Lamb, Talfourd, and many other celebrated
literati, 'all benefiting by hearing, which was but of little advantage
to the owner.' In the lawyers' chambers below were people wrangling,
swearing, and shouting, and some, too, even fighting, the only relief to
which was the eternal stamping of cognovits, bound in a book as large as
a family Bible." The Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and Lord
Chelmsford both at one time practised in the County Court, purchased
their situations for large sums, and afterwards sold them. "It was not a
bad nursery for a young barrister, as he had an opportunity of
addressing a jury. There were only four counsel who had a right to
practise in this court, and if you took a first-rate advocate in there
specially, you were obliged to give briefs to two of the privileged
four. On the tombstone of one of the compensated Marshalsea attorneys is
cut the bitterly ironical epitaph, "Blessed are the peacemakers: for
they shall be called the children of God.""
Coke, that great luminary of English jurisprudence, resided at
Clifford's Inn for a year, and then entered himself at the Inner Temple.
Coke, it will be remembered, conducted the prosecution of both Essex and
Raleigh; in both cases he was grossly unfeeling to fallen great men.
The George Dyer mentioned by Mr. Jay was not the author of "The Fleece,"
but that eccentric and amiable old scholar sketched by Charles Lamb in
"The Essays of Elia." Dyer was a poet and an antiquary, and edited
nearly all the 140 volumes of the Delphin Classics for Valpy.
Alternately writer, Baptist minister, and reporter, he eventually
settled down in the monastic solitude of Clifford's Inn to compose
verses, annotate Greek plays, and write for the magazines. How the
worthy, simple-hearted bookworm once walked straight from Lamb's parlour
in Colebrooke Row into the New River, and was then fished out and
restored with brandy-and-water, Lamb was never tired of telling. At the
latter part of his life poor old Dyer became totally blind. He died in
1841.
The hall of Clifford's Inn is memorable as being the place where Sir
Matthew Hale and seventeen other wise and patient judges sat, after the
Great Fire of 1666, to adjudicate upon the claims of the landlords and
tenants of burned houses, and prevent future lawsuits. The difficulty of
discovering the old boundaries, under the mountains of ashes, must have
been great; and forty thick folio volumes of decisions, now preserved in
the British Museum, tell of many a legal headache in Clifford's Inn.
A very singular custom, and probably of great antiquity, prevails after
the dinners at Clifford's Inn. The society is divided into two
sections--the Principal and Aules, and the Junior or "Kentish Men." When
the meal is over, the chairman of the Kentish Men, standing up at the
Junior table, bows gravely to the Principal, takes from the hand of a
servitor standing by four small rolls of bread, silently dashes them
three times on the table, and then pushes them down to the further end
of the board, from whence they are removed. Perfect silence is preserved
during this mystic ceremony, which some antiquary who sees deeper into
millstones than his brethren thinks typifies offerings to Ceres, who
first taught mankind the use of laws and originated those peculiar
ornaments of civilisation, their expounders, the lawyers.
In the hall is preserved an old oak folding case, containing the
forty-seven rules of the institution, now almost defaced, and probably
of the reign of Henry VIII. The hall casement contains armorial glass
with the bearings of Baptist Hicks, Viscount Camden, &c.
Robert Pultock, the almost unknown author of that graceful story, "Peter
Wilkins," from whose flying women Southey drew his poetical notion of
the Glendoveer, or flying spirit, in his wild poem of "The Curse of
Kehama," lived in this Inn, paced on its terrace, and mused in its
garden. "'Peter Wilkins' is to my mind," says Coleridge (in his "Table
Talk"), "a work of uncommon beauty, and yet Stothard's illustrations
have _added_ beauties to it. If it were not for a certain tendency to
affectation, scarcely any praise could be too high for Stothard's
designs. They give me great pleasure. I believe that 'Robinson Crusoe'
and 'Peter Wilkins' could only have been written by islanders. No
continentalist could have conceived either tale. Davis's story is an
imitation of 'Peter Wilkins,' but there are many beautiful things in it,
especially his finding his wife crouching by the fireside, she having,
in his absence, plucked out all her feathers, to be like him! It would
require a very peculiar genius to add another tale, _ejusdem generis_,
to 'Peter Wilkins' and 'Robinson Crusoe.' I once projected such a thing,
but the difficulty of a pre-occupied ground stopped me. Perhaps La Motte
Fouque might effect something; but I should fear that neither he nor any
other German could entirely understand what may be called the '_desert
island_' feeling. I would try the marvellous line of 'Peter Wilkins,' if
I attempted it, rather than the _real_ fiction of 'Robinson Crusoe.'"
The name of the author of "Peter Wilkins" was discovered only a few
years ago. In the year 1835 Mr. Nicol, the printer, sold by auction a
number of books and manuscripts in his possession, which had formerly
belonged to the well-known publisher, Dodsley; and in arranging them for
sale, the original agreement for the sale of the manuscript of "Peter
Wilkins," by the author, "Robert Pultock, of Clifford's Inn," to
Dodsley, was discovered. From this document it appears that Mr. Pultock
received twenty pounds, twelve copies of the work, and "the cuts of the
first impression"--_i.e._, a set of proof impressions of the fanciful
engravings that professed to illustrate the first edition of the
work--as the price of the entire copyright. This curious document had
been sold afterwards to John Wilkes, Esq., M.P.
Inns of Chancery, like Clifford's Inn, were originally law schools, to
prepare students for the larger Inns of Court.
Fetter Lane did not derive its name from the manufacture of Newgate
fetters. Stow, who died early in the reign of James I., calls it "Fewtor
Lane," from the Norman-French word "fewtor" (idle person, loafer),
perhaps analogous to the even less complimentary modern French word
"foutre" (blackguard). Mr. Jesse, however, derives the word "fetter"
from the Norman "defaytor" (defaulter), as if the lane had once been a
sanctuary for skulking debtors. In either case the derivation is
somewhat ignoble, but the inhabitants have long since lived it down.
Stow says it was once a mere byway leading to gardens (_quantum
mutatus!_) If men of the Bobadil and Pistol character ever did look over
the garden-gates and puff their Trinidado in the faces of respectable
passers-by, the lane at least regained its character later, when poets
and philosophers condescended to live in it, and persons of considerable
consequence rustled their silks and trailed their velvet along its
narrow roadway.
During the Middle Ages Fetter Lane slumbered, but it woke up on the
breaking out of the Civil War, and in 1643 became unpleasantly
celebrated as the spot where Waller's plot disastrously terminated.
In the second year of the war between King and Parliament, the Royal
successes at Bath, Bristol, and Cornwall, as well as the partial victory
at Edgehill, had roused the moderate party and chilled many lukewarm
adherents of the Puritans. The distrust of Pym and his friends soon
broke out into a reactionary plot, or, more probably, two plots, in one
or both of which Waller, the poet, was dangerously mixed up. The chief
conspirators were Tomkins and Challoner, the former Waller's
brother-in-law, a gentleman living in Holborn, near the end of Fetter
Lane, and a secretary to the Commissioners of the Royal Revenues; the
latter an eminent citizen, well known on 'Change. Many noblemen and
Cavalier officers and gentlemen had also a whispering knowledge of the
ticklish affair. The projects of these men, or of some of the more
desperate, at least, were--(1) to secure the king's children; (2) to
seize Mr. Pym, Colonel Hampden, and other members of Parliament
specially hostile to the king; (3) to arrest the Puritan Lord Mayor, and
all the sour-faced committee of the City Militia; (4) to capture the
outworks, forts, magazines, and gates of the Tower and City, and to
admit 3,000 Cavaliers sent from Oxford by a pre-arranged plan; (5) to
resist all payments imposed by Parliament for support of the armies of
the Earl of Essex. Unfortunately, just as the white ribbons were
preparing to tie round the arms of the conspirators, to mark them on the
night of action, a treacherous servant of Mr. Tomkins, of Holborn,
overheard Waller's plans from behind a convenient arras, and disclosed
them to the angry Parliament. In a cellar at Tomkins's the soldiers who
rummaged it found a commission sent from the king by Lady Aubigny, whose
husband had been recently killed at Edgehill.
Tomkins and Challoner were hung at the Holborn end of Fetter Lane. On
the ladder, Tomkins said:--"Gentlemen, I humbly acknowledge, in the
sight of Almighty God (to whom, and to angels, and to this great
assembly of people, I am now a spectacle), that my sins have deserved of
Him this untimely and shameful death; and, touching the business for
which I suffer, I acknowledge that affection to a brother-in-law, and
affection and gratitude to the king, whose bread I have eaten now about
twenty-two years (I have been servant to him when he was prince, and
ever since: it will be twenty-three years in August next)--I confess
these two motives drew me into this foolish business. I have often since
declared to good friends that I was glad it was discovered, because it
might have occasioned very ill consequences; and truly I have repented
having any hand in it."
Challoner was equally fatal against Waller, and said, when at the same
giddy altitude as Tomkins, "Gentlemen, this is the happiest day that
ever I had. I shall now, gentlemen, declare a little more of the
occasion of this, as I am desired by Mr. Peters [the famous Puritan
divine, Hugh Peters] to give him and the world satisfaction in it. It
came from Mr. Waller, under this notion, that if we could make a
moderate party here in London, and stand betwixt and in the gap to unite
the king and the Parliament, it would be a very acceptable work, for now
the three kingdoms lay a-bleeding; and unless that were done, there was
no hopes to unite them," &c.
Waller had a very narrow escape, but he extricated himself with the most
subtle skill, perhaps secretly aided by his kinsman, Cromwell. He talked
of his "carnal eye," of his repentance, of the danger of letting the
army try a member of the House. As Lord Clarendon says: "With incredible
dissimulation he acted such a remorse of conscience, that his trial was
put off, out of Christian compassion, till he could recover his
understanding." In the meantime, he bribed the Puritan preachers, and
listened with humble deference to their prayers for his repentance. He
bent abjectly before the House; and eventually, with a year's
imprisonment and a fine of L10,000, obtained leave to retire to France.
Having spent all his money in Paris, Waller at last obtained permission
from Cromwell to return to England. "There cannot," says Clarendon, "be
a greater evidence of the inestimable value of his (Waller's) parts,
than that he lived after this in the good esteem and affection of many,
the pity of most, and the reproach and scorn of few or none." The body
of the unlucky Tomkins was buried in the churchyard of St. Andrew's,
Holborn.
According to Peter Cunningham, that shining light of the Puritan party
in the early days of Cromwell, "Praise-God Barebone," was a
leather-seller in Fetter Lane, having a house, either at the same time
or later, called the "Lock and Key," near Crane Court, at which place
his son, a great speculator and builder, afterwards resided. Barebone
(probably Barbon, of a French Huguenot family) was one of those gloomy
religionists who looked on surplices, plum-porridge, theatres, dances,
Christmas pudding, and homicide as equally detestable, and did his best
to shut out all sunshine from that long, rainy, stormy day that is
called life. He was at the head of that fanatical, tender-conscienced
Parliament of 1653 that Cromwell convened from among the elect in
London, after untoward Sir Harry Vane had been expelled from Westminster
at the muzzles of Pride's muskets. Of Barebone, also, and his crochetty,
impracticable fellows, Cromwell had soon enough; and, in despair of all
aid but from his own brain and hand, he then took the title of Lord
Protector, and became the most inflexible and wisest monarch we have
ever had, or indeed ever hope to have. Barebone is first heard of in
local history as preaching in 1641, together with Mr. Greene, a
felt-maker, at a conventicle in Fetter Lane, a place always renowned for
its heterodoxy. The thoughtless Cavaliers, who did not like long
sermons, and thought all religion but their own hypocrisy, delighted in
gaunt Barebone's appropriate name, and made fun of him in those ribald
ballads in which they consigned red-nosed Noll, the brewer, to the
reddest and hottest portion of the unknown world. At the Restoration,
when all Fleet Street was ablaze with bonfires to roast the Rumps, the
street boys, always on the strongest side, broke poor Barebone's
windows, though he had been constable and common-councilman, and was a
wealthy leather-seller to boot. But he was not looked upon as of the
regicide or extreme dangerous party, and a year afterwards attended a
vestry-meeting unmolested. After the Great Fire he came to the
Clifford's Inn Appeal Court about his Fleet Street house, which had been
burnt over the heads of his tenants, and eventually he rebuilt it.
In Irving's "History of Dissenters" there is a curious account, from an
old pamphlet entitled "New Preachers," "of Barebone, Greene the
felt-maker, Spencer the horse-rubber, Quartermaine the brewer's clerk,
and some few others, who are mighty sticklers in this new kind of
talking trade, which many ignorant coxcombs call preaching; whereunto is
added the last tumult in Fleet Street, raised by the disorderly
preachment, pratings, and prattlings of Mr. Barebone the leather-seller,
and Mr. Greene the felt-maker, on Sunday last, the 19th December."
The tumult alluded to is thus described: "A brief touch in memory of the
fiery zeal of Mr. Barebone, a reverend unlearned leather-seller, who
with Mr. Greene the felt-maker were both taken preaching or prating in a
conventicle amongst a hundred persons, on Sunday, the 19th of December
last, 1641."
One of the pleasantest memories of Fetter Lane is that which connects it
with the school-days of that delightful essay-writer, Charles Lamb. He
himself, in one of Hone's chatty books, has described the school, and
Bird, its master, in his own charming way.
[Illustration: ROASTING THE RUMPS IN FLEET STREET (FROM AN OLD PRINT)
(_see page 95_).]
Both Lamb and his sister, says Mr. Fitzgerald, in his Memoir of Lamb,
went to a school where Starkey had been usher about a year before they
came to it--a room that looked into "a discoloured, dingy garden, in the
passage leading from Fetter Lane into Bartlett's Buildings. This was
close to Holborn. Queen Street, where Lamb lived when a boy, was in
Holborn." Bird is described as an "eminent writer" who taught
mathematics, which was no more than "cyphering." "Heaven knows what
languages were taught there. I am sure that neither my sister nor myself
brought any out of it but a little of our native English. It was, in
fact, a humble day-school." Bird and Cook, he says, were the masters.
Bird had "that peculiar mild tone--especially when he was inflicting
punishment--which is so much more terrible to children than the angriest
looks and gestures. Whippings were not frequent; but when they took
place, the correction was performed in a private room adjoining, whence
we could only hear the plaints, but saw nothing. This heightened the
decorum and solemnity." He then describes the ferule--"that almost
obsolete weapon now." "To make him look more formidable--if a pedagogue
had need of these heightenings--Bird wore one of those flowered Indian
gowns formerly in use with schoolmasters, the strange figures upon which
we used to interpret into hieroglyphics of pain and suffering." This is
in Lamb's most delightful vein. So, too, with other incidents of the
school, especially "our little leaden inkstands, not separately
subsisting, but sunk into the desks; and the agonising benches on which
we were all cramped together, and yet encouraged to attain a free hand,
unattainable in this position." Lamb recollected even his first
copy--"Art improves nature," and could look back with "pardonable pride
to his carrying off the first premium for spelling. Long after,
certainly thirty years, the school was still going on, only there was a
Latin inscription over the entrance in the lane, unknown in our humbler
days." In the evening was a short attendance of girls, to which Miss
Lamb went, and she recollected the theatricals, and even _Cato_ being
performed by the young gentlemen. "She describes the cast of the
characters with relish. 'Martha,' by the handsome Edgar Hickman, who
afterwards went to Africa."
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE MORAVIAN CHAPEL IN FETTER LANE (_see page
100_).]
The Starkey mentioned by Lamb was a poor, crippled dwarf, generally
known at Newcastle in his old age as "Captain Starkey," the butt of the
street-boys and the pensioner of benevolent citizens. In 1818, when he
had been an inmate of the Freemen's Hospital, Newcastle, for twenty-six
years, the poor old ex-usher of the Fetter Lane school wrote "The
Memoirs of his Life," a humble little pamphlet of only fourteen pages,
upon which Hone good-naturedly wrote an article which educed Lamb's
pleasant postscript. Starkey, it appears, had been usher, not in Lamb's
own time, but in that of Mary Lamb's, who came after her brother had
left. She describes Starkey running away on one occasion, being brought
back by his father, and sitting the remainder of the day with his head
buried in his hands, even the most mischievous boys respecting his utter
desolation.
That clever but mischievous advocate of divine right and absolute power,
Hobbes of Malmesbury, was lodging in Fetter Lane when he published his
"Leviathan." He was not there, however, in 1660, at the Restoration,
since we are told that on that _glorious_ occasion he was standing at
the door of Salisbury House, the mansion of his kind and generous
patron, the Earl of Devonshire; and that the king, formerly Hobbes's
pupil in mathematics, nodded to his old tutor. A short duodecimo sketch
of Hobbes may not be uninteresting. This sceptical philosopher, hardened
into dogmatic selfishness by exile, was the son of a Wiltshire
clergyman, and he first saw the light the year of the Armada, his mother
being prematurely confined during the first panic of the Spanish
invasion. Hobbes, with that same want of self-respect and love of
independence that actuated Gay and Thomson, remained his whole life a
tolerated pensioner of his former pupil, the Earl of Devonshire;
bearing, no doubt, in his time many rebuffs; for pride will be proud,
and rich men require wisdom, when in their pay, to remember its place.
Hobbes in his time was a friend of, and, it is said, a translator for,
Lord Bacon; and Ben Jonson, that ripe scholar, revised his sound
translation of "Thucydides." He sat at the feet of Galileo and by the
side of Gassendi and Descartes. While in Fetter Lane he associated with
Harvey, Selden, and Cowley. He talked and wrangled with the wise men of
half Europe. He had sat at Richelieu's table and been loaded with
honours by Cosmo de Medici. The laurels Hobbes won in the schools he
lost on Parnassus. His translation of Homer is tasteless and
contemptible. In mathematics, too, he was dismounted by Wallis and
others. Personally he had weaknesses. He was afraid of apparitions, he
dreaded assassination, and had a fear that Burnet and the bishops would
burn him as a heretic. His philosophy, though useful, as Mr. Mill says,
in expanding free thought and exciting inquiry, was based on
selfishness. Nothing can be falser and more detestable than the maxims
of this sage of the Restoration and of reaction. He holds the natural
condition of man to be a state of war--a war of all men against all men;
might making right, and the conqueror trampling down all the rest. The
civil laws, he declares, are the only standards of good or evil. The
sovereign, he asserts, possesses absolute power, and is not bound by any
compact with the people (who pay him as their head servant). Nothing he
does can be wrong. The sovereign has the right of interpreting
Scripture; and he thinks that Christians are bound to obey the laws of
an infidel king, even in matters of religion. He sneers at the belief in
a future state, and hints at materialism. These monstrous doctrines,
which even Charles II. would not fully sanction, were naturally battered
and bombarded by Harrington, Dr. Henry More, and others. Hobbes was also
vehemently attacked by that disagreeable Dr. Fell, the subject of the
well-known epigram,--
"I do not like thee, Dr. Fell;
The reason why I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Dr. Fell,"
who rudely called Hobbes "_irritabile illud et vanissimum Malmsburiense
animal_." The philosopher of Fetter Lane, who was short-sighted enough
to deride the early efforts of the Royal Society, though they were
founded on the strict inductive Baconian theory, seems to have been a
vain man, loving paradox rather than truth, and desirous of founding, at
all risks, a new school of philosophy. The Civil War had warped him;
solitary thinking had turned him into a cynical dogmatiser. He was timid
as Erasmus; and once confessed that if he was cast into a deep pit, and
the devil should put down his hot cloven foot, he would take hold of it
to draw himself out. This was not the metal that such men as Luther and
Latimer were made of; but it served for the Aristotle of Rochester and
Buckingham. A wit of the day proposed as Hobbes's epitaph the simple
words, "The philosopher's stone."
Hobbes's professed rule of health was to dedicate the morning to his
exercise and the afternoon to his studies. At his first rising,
therefore, he walked out and climbed any hill within his reach; or, if
the weather was not dry, he fatigued himself within doors by some
exercise or other, in order to perspire, recommending that practice upon
this opinion, that an old man had more moisture than heat, and therefore
by such motion heat was to be acquired and moisture expelled. After this
he took a comfortable breakfast, then went round the lodgings to wait
upon the earl, the countess, the children, and any considerable
strangers, paying some short addresses to all of them. He kept these
rounds till about twelve o'clock, when he had a little dinner provided
for him, which he ate always by himself, without ceremony. Soon after
dinner he retired to his study, and had his candle, with ten or twelve
pipes of tobacco, laid by him; then, shutting his door, he fell to
smoking, thinking, and writing for several hours.
At a small coal-shed (just one of those black bins still to be seen at
the south-west end) in Fetter Lane, Dr. Johnson's friend, Levett, the
poor apothecary, met a woman of bad character, who duped him into
marriage. The whole story, Dr. Johnson used to say, was as marvellous as
any page of "The Arabian Nights." Lord Macaulay, in his highly-coloured
and somewhat exaggerated way, calls Levett "an old quack doctor, who
bled and dosed coal-heavers and hackney-coachmen, and received for fees
crusts of bread, bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and a little copper."
Levett, however, was neither a quack nor a doctor, but an honest man and
an apothecary, and the list of his patients is entirely hypothetical.
This simple-hearted, benevolent man was persuaded by the proprietress of
the coal-shed that she had been defrauded of her birthright by her
kinsman, a man of fortune. Levett, then nearly sixty, married her; and
four months after, a writ was issued against him for debts contracted by
his wife, and he had to lie close to avoid the gaol. Not long afterwards
his amiable wife ran away from him, and, being taken up for picking
pockets, was tried at the Old Bailey, where she defended herself, and
was acquitted. Dr. Johnson then, touched by Levett's misfortunes and
goodness, took him to his own home at Bolt Court.
It was in a house on the east side of this lane, looking into
Fleur-de-Lys Court, that (in 1767) Elizabeth Brownrigge, midwife to the
St. Dunstan's workhouse and wife of a house-painter, cruelly ill-used
her two female apprentices. Mary Jones, one of these unfortunate
children, after being often beaten, ran back to the Foundling, from
whence she had been taken. On the remaining one, Mary Mitchell, the
wrath of the avaricious hag now fell with redoubled severity. The poor
creature was perpetually being stripped and beaten, was frequently
chained up at night nearly naked, was scratched, and her tongue cut with
scissors. It was the constant practice of Mrs. Brownrigge to fasten the
girl's hands to a rope slung from a beam in the kitchen, after which
this old wretch beat her four or five times in the same day with a broom
or a whip. The moanings and groans of the dying child, whose wounds were
mortifying from neglect, aroused the pity of a baker opposite, who sent
the overseers of the parish to see the child, who was found hid in a
buffet cupboard. She was taken to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and soon
died. Brownrigge was at once arrested; but Mrs. Brownrigge and her son,
disguising themselves in Rag Fair, fled to Wandsworth, and there took
lodgings in a chandler's shop, where they were arrested. The woman was
tried at the Old Bailey sessions, and found guilty of murder. Mr. Silas
Told, an excellent Methodist preacher, who attended her in the condemned
cell, has left a curious, simple-hearted account of her behaviour and of
what he considered her repentance. She _talked_ a great deal of
religion, and stood much on the goodness of her past life. The mob raged
terribly as she passed through the streets on her way to Tyburn. The
women especially screamed, "Tear off her hat; let us see her face! The
devil will fetch her!" and threw stones and mud, pitiless in their
hatred. After execution her corpse was thrust into a hackney-coach and
driven to Surgeons' Hall for dissection; the skeleton is still preserved
in a London collection. The cruel hag's husband and son were sentenced
to six months' imprisonment. A curious old drawing is still extant,
representing Mrs. Brownrigge in the condemned cell. She wears a large,
broad-brimmed gipsy hat, tied under her chin, and a cape; and her long,
hard face wears a horrible smirk of resigned hypocrisy. Canning, in one
of his bitter banters on Southey's republican odes, writes,--
"For this act
Did Brownrigge swing. Harsh laws! But time shall come
When France shall reign, and laws be all repealed."
In Castle Street (an offshoot of Fetter Lane), in 1709-10 (Queen Anne),
at the house of his father, a master tailor, was born a very small poet,
Paul Whitehead. This poor satirist and worthless man became a Jacobite
barrister and protege of Bubb Doddington and the Prince of Wales and his
Leicester Fields Court. For libelling Whig noblemen, in his poem called
"Manners," Dodsley, Whitehead's publisher, was summoned by the
Ministers, who wished to intimidate Pope, before the House of Lords. He
appears to have been an atheist, and was a member of the infamous
Hell-Fire Club, that held its obscene and blasphemous orgies at
Medmenham Abbey, in Buckinghamshire, the seat of Sir Francis Dashwood,
where every member assumed the name of an Apostle. Later in life
Whitehead was bought off by the Ministry, and then settled down at a
villa on Twickenham Common, where Hogarth used to visit him. If
Whitehead is ever remembered, it will be only for that splash of vitriol
that Churchill threw in his face, when he wrote of the turncoat,--
"May I--can worse disgrace on manhood fall?--
Be born a Whitehead and baptised a Paul."
It was this Whitehead, with Carey, the surgeon of the Prince of Wales,
who got up a mock procession, in ridicule of the Freemasons' annual
cavalcade from Brooke Street to Haberdashers' Hall. The ribald
procession consisted of shoe-blacks and chimney-sweeps, in carts drawn
by asses, followed by a mourning-coach with six horses, each of a
different colour. The City authorities very properly refused to let them
pass through Temple Bar, but they waited there and saluted the Masons.
Hogarth published a print of "The Scald Miserables," which is coarse,
and even dull. The Prince of Wales, with more good sense than usual,
dismissed Carey for this offensive buffoonery. Whitehead bequeathed his
heart to Earl Despenser, who buried it in his mausoleum with absurd
ceremonial.
At Pemberton Row, formerly Three-Leg Alley, Fetter Lane, lived that very
indifferent poet but admirable miniature-painter of Charles II.'s time,
Flatman. He was a briefless barrister of the Inner Temple, and resided
with his father till the period of his death. Anthony Wood tells us that
having written a scurrilous ballad against marriage, beginning,--
"Like a dog with a bottle tied close to his tail,
Like a Tory in a bog, or a thief in a jail,"
his comrades serenaded him with the song on his wedding-night. Rochester
wrote some vigorous lines on Flatman, which are not unworthy even of
Dryden himself,--
"Not that slow drudge, in swift Pindaric strains,
Flatman, who Cowley imitates with pains,
And drives a jaded Muse, whipt with loose reins."
We find Dr. Johnson quoting these lines with approval, in a conversation
in which he suggested that Pope had partly borrowed his "Dying
Christian" from Flatman.
"The chapel of the United Brethren, or Moravians, 32, Fetter Lane," says
Smith, in his "Streets of London," "was the meeting-house of the
celebrated Thomas Bradbury. During the riots which occurred on the trial
of Dr. Sacheveral, this chapel was assaulted by the mob and dismantled,
the preacher himself escaping with some difficulty. The other
meeting-houses that suffered on this occasion were those of Daniel
Burgess, in New Court, Carey Street; Mr. Earl's, in Hanover Street, Long
Acre; Mr. Taylor's, Leather Lane; Mr. Wright's, Great Carter Lane; and
Mr. Hamilton's, in St. John's Square, Clerkenwell. With the benches and
pulpits of several of these, the mob, after conducting Dr. Sacheveral in
triumph to his lodgings in the Temple, made a bonfire in the midst of
Lincoln's Inn Fields, around which they danced with shouts of 'High
Church and Sacheveral,' swearing, if they found Daniel Burgess, that
they would roast him in his own pulpit in the midst of the pile."
This Moravian chapel was one of the original eight conventicles where
Divine worship was permitted. Baxter preached here in 1672, and Wesley
and Whitefield also struck great blows at the devil in this pulpit,
where Zinzendorf's followers afterwards prayed and sang their fervent
hymns.
Count Zinzendorf, the poet, theologian, pastor, missionary, and
statesman, who first gave the Moravian body a vital organisation, and
who preached in Fetter Lane to the most tolerant class of all
Protestants, was born in Dresden in 1700. His ancestors, originally from
Austria, had been Crusaders and Counts of Zinzendorf. One of the
Zinzendorfs had been among the earliest converts to Lutheranism, and
became a voluntary exile for the faith. The count's father was one of
the Pietists, a sect protected by the first king of Prussia, the father
of Frederick the Great. The founder of the Pietists laid special stress
on the doctrine of conversion by a sudden transformation of the heart
and will. It was a young Moravian missionary to Georgia who first
induced Wesley to embrace the vital doctrine of justification by faith.
For a long time there was a close kinsmanship maintained between
Whitefield, the Wesleys, and the Moravians; but eventually Wesley
pronounced Zinzendorf as verging on Antinomianism, while Zinzendorf
objected to Wesley's doctrine of sinless perfection. In 1722 Zinzendorf
gave an asylum to two families of persecuted Moravian brothers, and
built houses for them on a spot he called Hernhut ("watched of the
Lord"), a marshy tract in Saxony, near the main road to Zittau. These
simple and pious men were Taborites, a section of the old Hussites, who
had renounced obedience to the Pope and embraced the Vaudois doctrines.
This was the first formation of the Moravian sect.
"On January 24th, 1672-73," says Baxter, "I began a Tuesday lecture at
Mr. Turner's church, in New Street, near Fetter Lane, with great
convenience and God's encouraging blessing; but I never took a penny for
it from any one." The chapel in which Baxter officiated in Fetter Lane
is that between Nevil's Court and New Street, once occupied by the
Moravians. It appears to have existed, though perhaps in a different
form, before the Great Fire of London. Turner, who was the first
minister, was a very active man during the plague. He was ejected from
Sunbury, in Middlesex, and continued to preach in Fetter Lane till
towards the end of the reign of Charles II., when he removed to Leather
Lane. Baxter carried on the Tuesday morning lecture till the 24th of
August, 1682. The Church which then met in it was under the care of Mr.
Lobb, whose predecessor had been Thankful Owen, president of St. John's
College, Oxford. Ejected by the commissioners in 1660, he became a
preacher in Fetter Lane. "He was," says Calamy, "a man of genteel
learning and an excellent temper, admir'd for an uncommon fluency and
easiness and sweetness in all his composures. After he was ejected he
retired to London, where he preached privately and was much respected.
He dy'd at his house in Hatton Garden, April 1, 1681. He was preparing
for the press, and had almost finished, a book entituled 'Imago
Imaginis,' the design of which was to show that Rome Papal was an image
of Rome Pagan."
At No. 96, Fetter Lane is an Independent Chapel, whose first minister
was Dr. Thomas Goodwin, 1660-1681--troublous times for Dissenters.
Goodwin had been a pastor in Holland and a favourite of Cromwell. The
Protector made him one of his commissioners for selecting preachers, and
he was also President of Magdalen College, Oxford. When Cromwell became
sick unto death, Goodwin boldly prophesied his recovery, and when the
great man died, in spite of him, he is said to have exclaimed, "Thou
hast deceived us, and we are deceived;" which is no doubt a Cavalier
calumny. On the Restoration, the Oxford men showed Goodwin the door, and
he retired to the seclusion of Fetter Lane. He seems to have been a good
scholar and an eminent Calvinist divine, and he left on Puritan shelves
five ponderous folio volumes of his works. The present chapel, says Mr.
Noble, dates from 1732, and the pastor is the Rev. John Spurgeon, the
father of the eloquent Baptist preacher, the Rev. C.H. Spurgeon.
The disgraceful disorder of the national records had long been a subject
of regret among English antiquaries. There was no certainty of finding
any required document among such a mass of ill-stored, dusty,
unclassified bundles and rolls--many of them never opened since the day
King John sullenly signed Magna Charta. We are a great conservative
people, and abuses take a long time ripening before they seem to us fit
for removal, so it happened that this evil went on several centuries
before it roused the attention of Parliament, and then it was talked
over and over, till in 1850 something was at last done. It was resolved
to build a special storehouse for national records, where the various
collections might be united under one roof, and there be arranged and
classified by learned men. The first stone of a magnificent Gothic
building was therefore laid by Lord Romilly on 24th May, 1851, and
slowly and surely, in the Anglo-Saxon manner, the walls grew till, in
the summer of 1866, all the new Search Offices were formally opened, to
the great convenience of all students of records. The architect, Sir
James Pennethorne, has produced a stately building, useful for its
purpose, but not very remarkable for picturesque light and shade, and
tame, as all imitations of bygone ages, adapted for bygone uses, must
ever be. The number of records stored within this building can only be
reckoned by "_hundreds of millions_." These are Sir Thomas Duffus
Hardy's own words. There, in cramped bundles and rolls, dusty as papyri,
lie charters and official notices that once made mailed knights tremble
and proud priests shake in their sandals. Now--the magic gone, the words
powerless--they lie in their several binns in strange companionship.
Many years will elapse before all these records of State and Government
documents can be classified; but the small staff is industrious, Sir
Thomas Hardy is working, and in time the Augean stable of crabbed
writings will be cleansed and ranged in order. The useful and accurate
calendars of Everett Green, John Bruce, &c., are books of reference
invaluable to historical students; and the old chronicles published by
order of Lord Romilly, so long Master of the Rolls and Keeper of the
Records, are most useful mines for the Froudes and Freemans of the
future. In time it is hoped that all the episcopal records of England
will be gathered together in this great treasure-house, and that many of
our English noblemen will imitate the patriotic generosity of Lord
Shaftesbury, in contributing their family papers to the same Gaza in
Fetter Lane. Under the concentrated gaze of learned eyes, family papers
(valueless and almost unintelligible to their original possessors),
often reveal very curious and important facts. Mere lumber in the
manor-house, fit only for the butterman, sometimes turns to leaves of
gold when submitted to such microscopic analysis. It was such a gift
that led to the discovery of the Locke papers among the records of the
nobleman above mentioned. The pleasant rooms of the Record Office are
open to all applicants; nor is any reference or troublesome preliminary
form required from those wishing to consult Court rolls or State papers
over twenty years old. Among other priceless treasures the Record Office
contains the original, uninjured, Domesday Book, compiled by order of
William, the conqueror of England. It is written in a beautiful clerkly
hand in close fine character, and is in a perfect state of preservation.
It is in two volumes, the covers of which are cut with due economy from
the same skin of parchment. Bound in massive board covers, and kept with
religious care under glass cases, the precious volumes seem indeed
likely to last to the very break of doom. It is curious to remark that
London only occupies some three or four pages. There is also preserved
the original Papal Bull sent to Henry VIII., with a golden seal attached
to it, the work of Benvenuto Cellini. The same collection contains the
celebrated Treaty of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the initial
portrait of Francis I. being beautifully illuminated and the vellum
volume adorned by an exquisite gold seal, in the finest relievo, also by
Benvenuto Cellini. The figures in this seal are so perfect in their
finish, that even the knee-cap of one of the nymphs is shaped with the
strictest anatomical accuracy. The visitor should also see the
interesting Inventory Books relating to the foundation of Henry VII.'s
chapel.
The national records were formerly bundled up any how in the Rolls
Chapel, the White Tower, the Chapter House, Westminster Abbey, Carlton
Ride in St. James's Park, the State Paper Office, and the Prerogative
Will Office. No one knew where anything was. They were unnoticed--mere
dusty lumber, in fact--useless to men or printers' devils. Hot-headed
Hugh Peters, during the Commonwealth, had, in his hatred of royalty,
proposed to make one great heap of them and burn them up in Smithfield.
In that way he hoped to clear the ground of many mischievous traditions.
This desperate act of Communism that tough-headed old lawyer, Prynne,
opposed tooth and nail. In 1656 he wrote a pamphlet, which he called "A
Short Demurrer against Cromwell's Project of Recalling the Jews from
their Banishment," and in this work he very nobly epitomizes the value
of these treasures; indeed, there could not be found a more lucid
syllabus of the contents of the present Record Office than Prynne has
there set forth.
[Illustration: HOUSE SAID TO HAVE BEEN OCCUPIED BY DRYDEN IN FETTER LANE
(_see page 102_).]
Dryden and Otway were contemporaries, and lived, it is said, for some
time opposite to each other in Fetter Lane. One morning the latter
happened to call upon his brother bard about breakfast-time, but was
told by the servant that his master was gone to breakfast with the Earl
of Pembroke. "Very well," said Otway, "tell your master that I will call
to-morrow morning." Accordingly he called about the same hour. "Well, is
your master at home now?" "No, sir; he is just gone to breakfast with
the Duke of Buckingham." "The d---- he is," said Otway, and, actuated
either by envy, pride, or disappointment, in a kind of involuntary
manner, he took up a piece of chalk which lay on a table which stood
upon the landing-place, near Dryden's chamber, and wrote over the
door,--
"Here lives Dryden, a poet and a wit."
The next morning, at breakfast, Dryden recognised the handwriting, and
told the servant to go to Otway and desire his company to breakfast with
him. In the meantime, to Otway's line of
"Here lives Dryden, _a poet and a wit_,"
he added,--
"This was written by Otway, _opposite_."
When Otway arrived he saw that his line was linked with a rhyme, and
being a man of rather petulant disposition, he took it in dudgeon,
and, turning upon his heel, told Dryden "that he was welcome to keep his
wit and his breakfast to himself."
[Illustration: A MEETING OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY IN CRANE COURT (_see p.
106_).]
A curious old book, a _vade mecum_ for malt worms _temp._ George I.,
thus immortalises the patriotism of a tavern-keeper in Fetter Lane:--
"Though there are some who, with invidious look,
Have styl'd this bird more like a Russian duck
Than what he stands depicted for on sign,
He proves he well has croaked for prey within,
From massy tankards, formed of silver plate,
That walk throughout this noted house in state,
Ever since _Englesfield_, in _Anna's_ reign,
To compliment each fortunate campaign,
Made one be hammered out for ev'ry town was ta'en."