CHAPTER VII

DOWN CHANCERY LANE

LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS

“London, Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.”--DICKENS.

The charming rustic-sounding name of Lincoln’s Inn Fields is known to everyone--did not Mr. Tulkinghorne live there?--but few people stray into the old square except those who are at odds with their neighbours and come to consult the men of law living there, as they did in Dickens’ day. The habitués come from Kingsway through Great Queen Street or Sardinia Street--the stranger takes the Piccadilly Tube to Holborn Station and, turning to the right along High Holborn, follows the first passage on the south side of the street that almost manages to conceal itself behind a protruding house.

This narrow winding Little Turnstile, and the Great Turnstile, a short distance farther along, are the only entrances from the north to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. An ugly lane, connecting these two passages and parallel with Holborn, is dignified by the disconcerting name of Whetstone Park. To-day it is only a row of stables, but Milton once had a lodging in one of the houses, that were always squalid and _mal habitées_, as Dryden’s plays attest.

Coming out of the tortuous Little Turnstile, you enter the spacious square of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The very name is alluring enough to make anyone want to go there, but there is nothing about the gardens to-day to show that they are among the oldest in London. They are as trim and well cared for as if they had been laid out yesterday. “Well cared for” means that all the pleasant green lawns and shady plane-trees are jealously railed off from the public, who loll somnolently on the many benches, their back turned to the lovely green oasis. It does not occur to any of the Fields’ frequenters to turn some of the seats round, so that they will have a more refreshing view than the dusty asphalt of the wide paths or the uninspiring sight of the slumbers of the unemployed, some of whom look as if they had slipped out of the frames of the Hogarth pictures in the Soane Museum.

It must be confessed that the interest of Lincoln’s Inn Fields lies not so much in the gardens--modernised out of every semblance of their seventeenth-century appearance--as in the beautiful old houses surrounding them--noble, dignified mansions some of those on the west side, built by Inigo Jones and once owned by Milords of Lindsay, Somers and Erskine. At the South Kensington Museum there is a

wonderful panelled staircase, a perfect specimen of its kind, that formerly graced the hall of No. 35.

Lindsay House, now Nos. 59 and 60, one of the Inigo Jones houses, was built for the Earl of Lindsay, who died fighting for Charles I. at Edgehill. Peter Cunningham says that it was called Ancaster House when the fourth earl was created Duke of Ancaster, and that he sold it to the proud Duke of Somerset--I do not know why Mr. Cunningham insists on his pride in italics--who married the widow of the Mr. Thomas Thynne whose murder by Count Koenigsmarck is so dramatically portrayed on his tomb in Westminster Abbey.

No. 66, at the corner of Great Queen Street, was once occupied by the Duke of Newcastle, George II.’s prime minister.

We have travelled far searching for freedom in the last 250 years and one would like to know how the Wellsian attitude is regarded by the ghost of the creator of this old house--the Marquis of Powis, who built it in 1686, before he was outlawed by William and Mary because of his loyalty to James II. He probably chose the site because it was near the chapel of the Sardinian Ambassador--the oldest Roman Catholic chapel in London--where the Roman Catholics used to go when they were deprived of their churches, and where Fanny Burney was married in 1793. It was removed, unluckily, in 1910.

There have been poets, too, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, before the men of law took possession. Milton and Thomas Campbell lived at No. 61 and Lord Tennyson at No. 58, where, you remember, Mr. Tulkinghorne of _Bleak House_ had his rooms.

It is a house also haunted with memories of Nell Gwynne, for she had lodgings here and gave birth to the first Duke of St. Albans, while she was still acting in the nearby theatre in Portugal Row!

This Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre stood just at the back of the Royal College of Surgeons, on the south side of the square. Three theatres called the Duke’s Theatre were successively built on the same spot. The first one was a pioneer in its way, for it was here that regular stage scenery was introduced in England and that women’s parts were first played by women. The ubiquitous Pepys was a regular frequenter of the theatre, and duly recorded his meeting with Nell Gwynne and that here he saw _Hamlet_ played for the first time.

Though it is seventy-three years since the last theatre was taken down to enlarge the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, and there is nothing to be seen of it to-day, I like to keep its memory green because it was here, on the night of January 29th, 1728, nearly two hundred years ago, that Lavinia Fenton, the first Polly Peachum, sang herself into the heart of the Duke of Bolton, when John Rich produced Mr. Gay’s _Beggar’s Opera_. It ran for sixty-two nights in one season and made “Gay rich and Rich gay.”

SOANE MUSEUM

“Thus the great city, towered and steepled, Is doubly peopled, Haunted by ghosts of the remembered past.” _London Poems._

There is one museum in London that I do not want to call a museum because in some ways it is so unlike one. Very few people ever go there. It is like the palace of the Sleeping Beauty. If you shut your eyes at the south-west corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and try not to notice the tentacular Lyons that unblushingly intrudes its smug modern shopfront into this old-world square, but stroll through the gardens to the north side, you will see the Soane Museum at No. 13. This is one of the most curious and neglected corners I have found in London. There are priceless things here like Hogarth’s _Rake’s Progress_, but for every hundred visitors who go to the National Gallery of British Art to see the _Marriage à la Mode_ only one comes to this quaint caravanserai of all sorts of objects.

Sir John Soane must surely have been the most agreeable bricklayer’s son who ever made his fortune as a great architect and had a pretty taste in art. You have only to look at his portrait by Lawrence, one of the last that great painter finished, to see what a kindly, benevolent man he was. Why, oh why, did he exact that his collection should remain unaltered! I know that the guide-books all extol the ingenuity with which so many things have been fitted into a small space, but if only one could sweep away the superfluous and unnecessary and rearrange the house like a perfect specimen of a home of the period, with the great pictures hung to the best advantage in the largest rooms and the basement reserved for the sarcophagus in its present place, with the best of the larger treasures that would be incongruous in the upper rooms! As it is, you must diligently hunt for what you want to see, for the delightful catalogue is more useful as a souvenir than a present help in finding anything.

There are things of human interest, like the watch Queen Anne gave to Sir Christopher Wren, or the pistol that Peter the Great collared from a Turkish Bey in 1696, that Alexander I. gave to Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807, and that Sir John Soane provokingly says he purchased under very peculiar circumstances--or the flamboyant jewel of Charles I. found among the royal baggage after the battle of Naseby--or Rousseau’s autograph letter--or those exquisite old books of Hours richly illuminated and written with such patient skill by some old Flemish monk five hundred years ago.

But the jewels of this unnoticed casket are the pictures. The courteous guardians, who all look like retired librarians, show with a certain melancholy pride the way to the tiny room where hang Turner’s fine painting of _Van Tromp’s Barge_ and two of his water-colours, Watteau’s _Les Noces_, and the greatest treasures of the whole collection, Hogarth’s pictures of _The Rake’s Progress_ and the four big canvases of _The Election_.

Besides all this there are wonderful Flemish wood carvings and manuscripts, and, in the crypt, the interesting three-thousand-year-old tomb of Seti I., King of Egypt, whose inscriptions Sir John did not live to see deciphered.

There was an air of wistfulness about the place. It had been arranged with so much loving care, and so few people profit by it though the reward of going is great.

Perhaps Sir John Soane did not want anybody but art-lovers to see his collection, or he would surely not have closed it to the public on Saturday, Sunday and Monday all the year round and for the entire months of September, December, January and February. It is true that students and other visitors may apply to the curator for admission at other times, and foreigners are admitted on presentation of their visiting card on any day except Sunday and Bank Holidays, but what Londoner, with richer collections open every day in the week, could be expected to remember the capriciousness of the guardians of Sir John Soane’s treasures, who are like the suburban hostess announcing her reception days as first and third Tuesdays and fifth Friday? In despair of remembering when the good lady was at home, you would never call on her. No, if you want to see the Hogarths, my advice is to wrap yourself in the cloak of a foreigner and present your card at the door of this neglected London museum between the hours of ten and five.

LINCOLN’S INN

“The Walks of Lincoln’s Inn Under the Elms.” BEN JONSON.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields are bordered on the east side by Lincoln’s Inn, but I like better to approach the old squares by the brick gatehouse in Chancery Lane. It is the oldest part of Lincoln’s Inn, and a very fine example of Tudor brickwork. The Sir Thomas Lovel who built it in 1518 put his own arms over the gateway, never dreaming that when his name would mean nothing to the passer-by, the name of a bricklayer, one Ben Jonson who worked, with a trowel in one hand and a book in the other, at the adjoining buildings about a hundred years later, would need no coat of arms to preserve his memory. People like Mr. Muirhead, who see things in the light of cold reason, argue that in 1617 Jonson was forty-four and already famous, so he had probably laid down the trowel,--but I prefer to believe old Fuller, who said Ben Jonson helped in the building of the new structure in Lincoln’s Inn.

There are four of these old Inns of Court, that have lasted since the thirteenth century--the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple, Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s Inn. Few visitors to London go out of their way to stroll in their shady courtyards, but there are not many corners of London where you can so easily shake off the oppression of the blare of machinery and recapture the spirit of a time when the study of the law was not thought incompatible with many pleasanter, more frivolous things.

One old chronicler says: “There is both in the Inns of Court and the Inns of Chancery, a sort of academy or gymnasium where they learn singing and all kinds of music, and such other accomplishments and diversions (which are called revels) as are suitable to their quality and usually practised at court. All vice is discouraged and banished. The greatest nobility of the kingdom often place their children in those Inns of Court--not so much as to make the law their study but to form their manners.”

I have no predilection for the legal profession, being, like most of my kind, filled with amazement at the lack of logic and the crass inconsequences that attend the administration of justice in any country. In fact I have a fellow-feeling for Peter the Great, who knew his own mind and had no herd opinions. When he was taken into Westminster Hall, he inquired who those busy people were in wigs and black gowns. He was answered, “They are lawyers.” “Lawyers?” said he, with a face of astonishment. “Why, I have but two in my whole dominions, and I believe I shall hang one of them the moment I get home.”

I suppose in no country in the world is the study and practice of the law surrounded with such debonair amenities as in London. Who would not be a lawyer, since that profession is the Open Sesame to shady gardens, lodgings in history-haunted rooms, and a prideful possession in such rare buildings as the Church of the Knights Templars?

Lincoln’s Inn takes its name from a thirteenth century Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, who had a mansion in Chancery Lane near the first church of the Knights Templars. His arms are carved over the brick gateway, separated from those of the builder, Sir Thomas Lovel, by the royal arms of England. None of the existing old buildings are later than Tudor times.

The old Inn has had many illustrious members, lodgers and visitors. Oliver Cromwell used to come here to see Thurloe, his secretary of state, who lived at 24 Old Buildings, and there is the story of how he nearly killed a young clerk he found apparently asleep when he had been plotting with Thurloe to seize Prince Charles. Thurloe dissuaded him by passing a lighted candle before the young man’s eyes to prove he was really asleep, and the clerk lived to warn the prince, who when he became king paid several visits to Lincoln’s Inn. Both Pepys and Evelyn record his presence at the “revels,” when learning was encouraged by indulgence in dancing. In the Admittance Book are the signatures of Charles II., the Duke of York, Prince Rupert and the Duke of Monmouth, written in 1671.

Dr. John Donne and Sir Thomas More were both connected with Lincoln’s Inn. Dr. Donne laid the foundation-stone and preached the consecration sermon of the chapel that Inigo Jones designed in 1623, since so disastrously restored. It is built on arches, so you can walk about under the Gothic roof, as Pepys said he did “by agreement” on the 27th of June, 1663, but you will not see the six seventeenth-century windows, for they were shattered by an explosion in October, 1915.

Sir Thomas More has a more intimate connection with the Inn, for his father and grandfather held the office of butler and steward, and for their long and faithful services were rewarded by admission into the Society of Lincoln’s Inn and by the much-prized office of Reader.

The wonderful law library is now housed in the new red-brick hall, decorated with Watts’ fresco of “The Lawgivers of the World,” but the old hall built about 400 years ago is still in use, though it, too, has suffered from the hands of the restorer.

Only the benchers and members of Lincoln’s Inn may use the elm-shaded gardens. They not only fulfil Pepys’ prophecy that they would be very pretty, but they had a useful war record, as a memorial tablet shows.

I am told that the Curfew is still rung at Lincoln’s Inn. At a quarter to nine each evening the chief porter climbs to the tower of the chapel and when the hour has struck he sounds the curfew fifty times. The bell used was brought from Cadiz by the Earl of Essex in 1596.

RECORD OFFICE

“Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty.” WORDSWORTH.

Coming out into Chancery Lane once more and turning down towards Fleet Street, you will see on your left a huge grey building in Tudor style, where once stood the House of the Converts.

It was called by that name when Henry III. founded a House in 1232 to receive converted Jews. I hardly like to tell you that the present name is the Record Office. It is too pompous and official-sounding, and perhaps that is why people pass the House of the Converts never suspecting the presence of the entrancing, memory-evoking things within.

You enter the enchanted room by descending a short flight of stone steps, after going through a forbidding portal and along a green sward into a modern grey building in one of the very busiest of the London streets.

You will know why I call it an enchanted room as soon as you see the beautiful chapel-like precincts named the House of the Converts nearly 700 years ago, before it was used from Edward III.’s time as the Chapel of the Rolls.

The stained glass windows give a mellow light to the admirable Torrigiano monument of a sixteenth century Master of the Rolls and the delicately carved alabaster tomb of Richard Alington and his wife Jane. Near by is the recumbent figure of another Master, with the little figures of his children kneeling below, one of them the little daughter born on Christmas Day and married when she was only twelve years old, “a pretty red-headed wench,” to William Cavendish, afterwards Earl of Devonshire, in the year of grace 1608.

There are all sorts of other treasures in this mysterious room, that is open to all comers between the hours of two and four, any day in the week except, alas, Saturday or Sunday.

You may look on the handwriting of “Jane the Quene,” in one of the very few documents signed by Lady Jane Grey during her nine days’ reign, or read the pathetic letter written by Mary Queen of Scots to Sir William Cecil, “Mester Cessilles,” she calls him in the queer Scottish-English sometimes used by “yowr richt asured good friend, Marie R.”

For here are guarded poignant souvenirs of long-dead men and women, of whose sorrows and anguish of mind nothing is left but the yellowing paper covered with the almost illegible writing of their times. You will find the cry of Sir Philip Sidney to Jaen Wyer the Court surgeon of His Highness of Cleves, written when he lay dying from his wound at the battle of Zutphen: “Come, my Weier, come. I am in danger of my life and I want you here. Neither living or dead shall I be ungrateful. I can write no more, but I earnestly pray you to make haste. Farewell. At Arnem. Yours, Ph. Sidney.” And Sir Walter Raleigh’s letter to Queen Anne, the wife of James the First, where he says: “My extreme shortness of breath doth grow fast on me, with the dispayre of obtayning so mich grace to walke with my keeper up the hill within the Tower.”

The letters are not all sorrowful, but they all have the power to breathe life into the dry bones of history. Not far from the heart-felt appeal of the great Cardinal Wolsey to Henry VIII., praying for “grace, mercy, remissyon and pardon,” and signed “Your Graces moste prostrat poor chapleyn, creature, and bedisman,” is a letter from ten-year-old William of Orange, quaint letters from Leicester and Essex to their fickle queen, and a dignified epistle, lamenting the outbreak of war between France and England, but renouncing his fealty and homage to Richard II., from a fourteenth century member of that noble Picardie family whose proud device was:

Roy ne suis, ne prince ne duc, ne comte aussy: Je suis sire de Coucy.

Old letters are not the only treasures in this corner belonging to another age. There are beautiful fourteenth-century chests, a bulla carved by Benvenuto Cellini, that prince of goldsmiths and autobiographers, and indeed the greatest treasure of all, that I have kept till the last.

One first hears of the Domesday Book in the days when one has visions of a vast tome with some vague connection with the Day of Judgment. Not even _Little Arthur_ could dispel the prodigious respect and awe one felt for it. I confused it with the book in which one’s manifold sins are recorded, and even mature age does not prevent a little secret satisfaction that has nothing historical at the sight of those fat, brown hundreds-of-years-old books that we owe to William the Conqueror’s Norman love for exact accounts.

The Domesday Books used to be kept in the Chapter House at Westminster and were only moved to the Record Office in 1839.

NEVILL’S COURT

“Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts.”--DR. JOHNSON.

A stone’s throw from the east end of the Record Office is one of the most curious unnoticed corners of old London. Go up Fetter Lane, which is the next turning to Chancery Lane out of Fleet Street, and at No. 34, close to the Moravian Chapel, you will see a narrow passage called Nevill’s Court. This passage leads you straight into one of the oldest bits of London still existing, for here in the very heart of newspaper land are little ancient seventeenth-century houses with cottage gardens. They give one the same feeling of unexpectedness as those other queer little wooden houses with their high gables that you may see in Collingwood Street, just on the other side of Blackfriars Bridge (I think it is the third turning to the right). They stand beside the church, just as they stood nearly three hundred years ago, when the Thames washed right up to their doorsteps.

At No. 6 Nevill’s Court, secluded in its walled garden, is a big seventeenth-century house, which must once have been inhabited by citizens of wealth and position. It is extraordinary that Time and the Vandal have left it still intact. I think the reason must be that they have never been able to find it, like those other old houses in Wardrobe Court near St. Paul’s, whose whereabouts certainly ought to be set as a problem in a London taxi-driver’s examination.

But before seeking the house, there is something to notice in Nevill’s Court. The main entrance to the Moravian Chapel is in Fetter Lane, at No. 33. I once went to the service there at three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon under the influence of the story of the messenger sent while Bradbury was preaching, to announce Queen Anne’s death and the safety of the Protestant succession. I hoped to find something to remind me of the chapel’s great age: it is the oldest place of Protestant worship in London, going back to Queen Mary’s day, when persecuted Protestants are supposed to have met in the sawpit of the carpenter’s yard on this site.

Down the long, narrow passage, I found a bare, uncompromising chapel, with a high, wooden pulpit, that I looked at with more respect than its ugliness warranted, remembering that Baxter had preached here in 1672, and that John Wesley and Whitefield had addressed crowded congregations during the year Wesley spent with the Moravians between the time that he left the Church of England and the founding of the Methodist persuasion in 1740. The boundary line between St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, and St. Dunstan’s in the West is just in front of the pulpit, so the preacher and his congregation are in different parishes.

The chapel has been used by the Moravian sect since 1738, and as their lease does not expire for about another 250 years, it is not likely to change ownership, in spite of the dwindling congregation.

It has been so many times restored and rebuilt that one gets a much better idea of the antiquity of the building from the back entrance in Nevill’s Court, for this is the only part that could possibly have existed before the Great Fire.

CLIFFORD’S INN

“Oh! London! London! our delight, Great flower that opens but at night.” R. LE GALLIENNE.

Between Chancery Lane and Fetter Lane is the entrance to Clifford’s Inn, the oldest of all the Inns of Chancery. In January, 1921, big flaunting notice-boards announced that Clifford’s Inn would be sold by auction, but no immediate purchaser was found, and this quiet corner is still unmolested, though by the time this book is printed it may have received its _coup de grâce_ from the pickaxe.

Go and look at it while you may. It was founded in 1345 and takes its name from a certain Robert Clifford of Edward II.’s reign. Sir Edward Coke, the great Elizabethan lawyer, was a member of Clifford’s Inn and left it for the Middle Temple in 1572.

Some of the Inn survived the Great Fire, and in the crazy-looking little old hall the judges sat who decided the many boundary disputes after that catastrophe. At the moment it is the headquarters of some society “duquel je ne sçais pas le nom.”

Samuel Butler lived at No. 15 Clifford’s Inn for thirty-eight years, and many an admirer of the genius of the man who wrote _Erewhon_ and _The Way of all Flesh_ has made a pilgrimage to the quiet corner hidden away a few yards from bustling Fleet Street.