Cecil Headlam

“ On occasions of more particular festivity, even so great dignitaries as the Lord-Chancellor, the Justices, Serjeants, and Benchers, would dance round the coal fire which blazed beneath the louvre in the centre of the Hall, whilst the verses of the Song of the House rang out in rousing chorus, like the song of the Mallard of All Souls, at Oxford. ”

“ Nothing could be more striking or delightful than the block of quaint old buildings, with its overhanging stories of timber and rough-cast, and its gabled roof. The preservation of this delightful specimen of Elizabethan domestic architecture, which stands at Holborn Bars like an island of art in an ocean of crude ugliness, we owe to the wisdom{170} and good taste of the Directors of the Prudential Assurance Company, to whom the site now belongs. It is a pleasure to express one’s gratitude to them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Another Gateway by ‘Jockey Fields,’ in Theobald’s Road, leads past Raymond Buildings, the same kind of ugly, unabashed, stock-brick barracks as Verulam Buildings, and dating from the same period. Crude and unpleasing as these dull blocks are to behold, they have the great advantage of being very pleasant to live in, for they line and look out upon the Gardens which the great Philosopher laid out. ”

“ For the site of the modern Law Courts—that Gothic pile which we can never wholly see, and in which Street just failed to design a truly complete, effective, and absolute building, and failed entirely to produce a building practically suited for its purpose—was known then as Fitchett’s Field. The scene of the labours of the Lawyers, who have succeeded to their inheritance, was once the tilting-ground of the Knights Templars. ”

“ Here Dickens talks with Thackeray, and Blackstone scowls at Goldsmith; there, in the Middle Temple Hall, Queen Elizabeth leads the dance with Sir Christopher Hatton, and the rafters ring with the music of Shakespeare’s voice and Shakespeare’s poetry. And the buildings themselves are the works of a noble army of English Architects, admirable creations and memorials of the genius of Sir Christopher Wren, Inigo Jones, Adam, Hardwick, Street, and of the unknown builders of Norman, Gothic, and Elizabethan things. ”

“ And whilst Oxford and Cambridge, essentially more democratic, drew their students chiefly from the yeoman and artisan class, the Inns of Court became the fashionable colleges for young noblemen and gentlemen.
Throughout the Renaissance, indeed, the Inns of Court men were the leaders of Society, and the Gentlemen of the Long Robe laid down the law, not only upon questions of politics, but upon points of taste, of dress, and of art. ”

“ The best collection of jests in the world is that which he dictated from memory, without referring to any book, on a day on which illness had rendered him incapable of serious study.’ It is the brain and personality of such a genius that haunts this spacious, quiet square of Gray’s Inn. ”

“ Such is the story of the Inns of Court, which have gone on from strength to strength, and of the Inns of Chancery and the Serjeants’ Inns, which have almost vanished, together with the Societies which made them famous, from off the changing face of London. It is a story which, though briefly told, and told by a layman who makes no claim to originality of material, can hardly fail to be of interest to those who are alive to the charm of the old things of the Capital. ”

“ THE TEMPLE CHURCH It is natural to turn from this story of the Templars to the Round Church in the Temple, which is their chief memorial. We leave the roar and rattle of Fleet Street, and pass through the low Gateway of the Inner Temple into the narrow lane which leads us between the gross modern buildings, called after Oliver Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson, to the west end of the Church—the west end, which is formed by the round building which we have already mentioned.
The Gate-House beneath which we have passed is in itself a building of no ordinary interest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such, in brief outline, is the history of the Four Inns of Court, in which is vested the monopoly of calling to the Bar of England such students as have kept terms at the Inn, and have commended{164} themselves to the approval of the Benchers. Starting as independent voluntary associations of students and practisers of the law, either in connection with the Court of some great Justiciar, or merely in hostels, where the apprentices might find board and lodging during their years of learning, they developed into Societies, nobly housed, which controlled their students after a collegiate fashion. ”

“ It is somewhat outside the scope of this book to deal with the dwellers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, but mention may be made of Thomas Campbell, the poet, who had chambers at No. 61, whilst No. 58 was the House of Forster, the biographer of Dickens, which is described in ‘Bleak House’: ‘Formerly a house of State ... in these shrunken fragments of its greatness lawyers lie, like maggots in nuts.’
More fascinating than all is that ‘Old Curiosity Shop’ which still survives upon a tiny triangular plot amidst the ruin of tenements that have been lately razed to the ground. ”

“ The windows at the East End were filled with very inferior modern stained glass, none of it of the least interest, poor in colour and wretchedly ignorant in design—ignorant, that is, of the rules which guided the art of the medieval glazier.
A bust of the ‘Judicious’ Hooker, Master of the Temple Church, and author of the ‘Ecclesiastical Polity,’ the grave of Selden near the South-West corner of the Choir, and above it a mural tablet to his memory, are the monuments of known men most worthy of attention. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Bacon’s love of gardening is breathed in every line of his delightful Essay upon Gardens. ‘God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, without which buildings and palaces are but gross handyworks.’ And it appears probable that the Gardens of Gray’s Inn were laid out under his direction in 1597 and{161} the following years. ”

“ Of the Templars’ Treasure House nothing now remains, but the Treasurer survives, one of the chief officials of the Inn, whose duties correspond roughly to those of a Bursar of an Oxford College.
The laying up of treasure upon earth is always apt to provoke the predatory instinct, even in the breast of a Chancellor of the Exchequer, and to the motive of greed was added, in the case of the Templars, the unanswerable charge that they had done nothing for many years to redeem their vows to succour Jerusalem or protect pilgrims. ”

“ They contribute enormously to the charm and beauty of her riper years, for they point to a life rich in experience and varied reminiscences. But, like other wrinkles, they have their drawbacks. As the bottle-neck of Bond Street, which blocks the traffic half the season, is the direct topographical result of the river which once flowed thereabouts, so the boundary of the property of the Knights Templars, marked by the Inner and Middle Temple Gateways, imposes the southern limit of Fleet Street, opposite to Street’s Gothic pile of Law Courts and to Chancery Lane. ”

“ 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{81} 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. ”

“ The roof is elaborately carved, and ornamented with colour and gilt. The windows are rich in stained glass; the royal arms figure in the centre of the beautiful south window, the others are filled with old glass. In some directions, it must be confessed, the decoration is a trifle overdone, especially the heraldic decoration. The arms of the Inn, fifteen fers de moline on a blue ground, with the shield of Lacy ‘or, a lion rampant purpure,’ are repeated with bewildering frequency in every material.
Above the daïs is the great fresco ‘School of Legislation’ (1852) . ”

“ Beyond South Square stretches a delightful quadrangle of homogeneous houses, which contains a large gravelled centre, bordered by a few sickly plane-trees. This is Gray’s Inn Square, which, as we have seen, took the place of Coney Court and Chapel Court. It was at No. 1, Coney Court, burnt down in 1678, that Bacon, ‘the greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind,’ is said to have lived. The site of his rooms is covered now by No. 1,{156} Gray’s Inn Square, part of the row of buildings erected in 1868 at the West end of this Court. ”

“ Aubrey, in his ‘Lives,’ records that Ben Jonson worked some time with his father-in-law, a bricklayer, ‘and particularly on the garden wall of Lincoln’s Inne, next to Chancery Lane.... A bencher, walking thro’ and hearing him repeat some Greeke verses out of Homer, and finding him to have a wit extraordinary, gave him some exhibition to maintain him at Trinity College in Cambridge.’ This is only a tradition, though a very likely one; and, as Leigh Hunt says, tradition is valuable when it helps to make such a flower grow out of an old wall. ”

“ Loftie very justly observes of the Middle Temple that ‘Its Lawn seems wider, its trees are higher, its Hall is older, its Courts are quainter, than those of the other member of this inseparable pair.’ The Middle Temple has, indeed, been unkindly compared to a beautiful woman with a plain husband. ”

“ So long as the riots continued, the Lawyers kept armed watch in the Halls of their respective Societies. At the Inner Temple the mob forced the gate, ‘and would no doubt have plundered and burnt the place as Wat Tyler’s followers did four centuries before, had not a sergeant of the Guards, who acted as military instructor to the law-gentlemen, called out to the armed Templars: “Take care no gentleman fires from behind!” ”

“ The internal politics of the Houses were occasionally lively. Thus at the Middle Temple the right of the Benchers to regulate the affairs of the Inn, without reference to the Parliaments of barristers and students to whom, apparently, the right of self-government within certain limits was, by ancient custom, entrusted in the Vacations, was a ground of hot dispute in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The right to hold a Parliament at any time was demanded. ”

“ Here all the Judges, as having been Serjeants-at-Law before their elevation to the Bench, had chambers assigned to them.
A plain, unpleasing, stuccoed, Early Victorian building now faces Chancery Lane, and drops as a screen of ugliness across the old brick buildings within. This we owe to Sir Robert Smirke, who rebuilt the Inn (1837-1838) , with the exception of the old Hall, which was ‘approached by a handsome flight of stone steps and balustrade.’ So Herbert, who says that in his day (1804) all the buildings were modern. ”

“ During the rising of the Young Pretender in ’45, Chief Justice Willes raised a regiment ‘for the defence of the King’s person.’ The occasion for arms passed away quickly, and it was not till 1780 that the barristers and students found themselves compelled once more to meet force by force. For the Gordon Rioters, after sacking Lord Mansfield’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, set fire to a distillery belonging to a papist, near Barnard’s Inn, and the gutters of Holborn ran with blazing spirit, of which the rioters drank until they died. ”

“ 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{68} 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. ”

“ In the reign of Elizabeth, by an order of the Judges for all the Inns of Court, the wearing of a sword or buckler, of a beard above a fortnight’s growth, or of great hose, great ruffs, any silk or fur, was equally forbidden, and no Fellow of these Societies was allowed to go into the City or suburbs ‘otherwise than in his gown according to the ancient usage of the gentlemen of the Inns of Court,’ upon penalty of expulsion for the third transgression. ”

“ The heraldic sign of the Winged Horse, which is now the well-known badge of the Inner Temple, and meets the eye at every turn as we pass through the narrow lanes and devious courts of which their property is composed, recalls and typifies the changing purposes of the ancient Templars and their successors. ”

“ Francis Bacon, in the dedication quoted below, describes Gray’s Inn as ‘the place whence my father was called to the highest place of justice, and where myself have lived and had my proceedings, and therefore few men are so bound to their Societies by obligation both ancestral and personal as I am to yours.’ An Order in the following year, 1577, directed that all the sons of Sir Nicholas Bacon should be ‘of the Grand Company and not be bound to any vacations.’ In the{157} twenty-eighth year of Elizabeth, Francis Bacon was advanced to the Readers’ Table. ”