Chapter XIV: Lincoln’s Inn Fields (1)

Lincoln’s Inn, originally belonging to the Black Friars before they removed Thames-ward, derives its name from Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, to whom it was given by Edward I., and whose town house or inn stood on the same site in the reign of Edward I. Earl Henry died in 1312, the year in which Gaveston was killed, and his monument was one of the stateliest in the old church. His arms are still those of the inn and of its tributaries, Furnival’s and Thavies inns. There is yet extant an old account of the earl’s bailiff, relating to the sale of the fruit of his master’s garden. The noble’s table was supplied and the residue sold. The apples, pears, large nuts, and cherries, the beans, onions, garlic, and leeks, produced a profit of £9: 2: 3 (about £135 in modern money). The only flowers were roses. The bailiff, it appears, expended 8s. a year in purchasing small fry, frogs, and eels, to feed the pike in the pond or vivary.[665]

Part of the Chancery Lane side of Lincoln’s Inn was in 1217 and 1272 “the mansion house” of William de Haverhill, treasurer to King Henry III. He was attainted for treason, and his house and lands were confiscated to the king, who then gave his house to Ralph Neville, Chancellor of England and Bishop of Chichester, who built there “a fair house;” and the Bishops of Chichester inhabited it there till Henry VII.’s time, when they let it to law students, reserving lodgings for themselves, and it fell into the hands of Judge Sulyard and other feoffees. This family held it till Elizabeth’s time, when Sir Edward Sulyard, of Essex, sold the estate to the Benchers,[666] who then began enlarging their frontier and building.

The plain Tudor gateway with the two side towers soaked with black smoke, the oldest part of the existing structure, was built in 1518 by Sir Thomas Lovell, a member of this inn and treasurer of the household to Henry VII., when great alterations took place in the inn. What thousands of wise men and rogues have passed under its murky shadow! None of the original building is left. The Black Friars’ House fronted the Holborn end of the Bishop’s Palace.[667] The chambers adjoining the Gate House are of a later date and it was at these that Mr. Cunningham thinks Ben Jonson worked.[668]

The chapel, of debased Perpendicular Gothic, was built by Inigo Jones, and consecrated in 1623, Dr. Donne the poet preaching the consecration sermon. The stained glass was the work of a Mr. Hale of Fetter Lane. The twelve apostles, Moses, and the prophets still glow like immortal flowers, bright as when Donne, or Ussher, watched the light they shed. One of the windows bears the name of Bernard van Linge, the same man probably who executed the windows at Wadham College, Oxford.[669] Noy, the Attorney-General and creature of Charles I., a friend of Laud, and the proposer of the writ for ship-money, put up the window representing John the Baptist, rather an ominous saint, surely, in Charles’s time. Noy died in 1634, before the storm which would certainly have carried his head off. He left his money to a prodigal son, who was afterwards killed in a duel,--“Left to be squandered, and I hope no better from him,” says the dying man, bitterly. It was Noy who decided the curious case of the three graziers who left their money with their hostess. One of them afterwards returned and ran off with the money; upon which the other two sued the woman, denying their consent. Mr. Noy pleaded that the money was ready to be given up directly the three men came together and claimed it.[670] Rogers tells this story in his poem of “Italy,” and gives it a romantic turn.

Laud, always restless for novelties that could look like Rome, and yet not be Rome, referred to the Lincoln’s Inn windows at his trial. He wondered at a Mr. Brown objecting to such things, considering he was not of Lincoln’s Inn, “where Mr. Prynne’s zeal had not yet beaten down the images of the apostles in the fair windows of that chapel, which windows were set up new long since the statute of Edward VI.; and it is well known,” says that enemy of the Puritans, “that I was once resolved to have returned this upon Mr. Brown in the House of Commons, but changed my mind, lest thereby I might have set some furious spirit at work to destroy those harmless goodly windows, to the just dislike of that worthy society.”[671]

The crypt under the chapel rests on many pillars and strong-backed arches, and, like the cloisters in the Temple, was intended as a place for student-lawyers to walk in and exchange learning. Butler describes witnesses of the straw-bail species waiting here for customers,[672] just as half a century ago they used to haunt the doors of Chancery Lane gin-shops. On a June day in 1663 Pepys came to walk under the chapel by appointment, after pacing up and down and admiring the new garden then constructing.

The great Sir Thomas More, Chancellor of England in Henry VIII.’s time, had chambers at Lincoln’s Inn when he was living in Bucklersbury after his marriage. This was about 1506. He wrote his _Utopia_ in 1516. King Henry grew so fond of More’s learned and witty conversation, that he used to constantly send for him to supper, and would walk in the garden at Chelsea with his arm round his neck. More was beheaded in 1535 for refusing to take the oath of succession and acknowledge the legality of the king’s divorce from Catherine of Arragon. Erasmus, who knew More well, inscribed the “Nux” of Ovid to his son. More’s skull is still preserved, it is said, in the vault of St. Dunstan’s Church at Canterbury.[673] More’s daughter, Margaret Roper, was buried with it in her arms.

Dr. Donne, the divine and poet, whose mother was distantly related to Sir Thomas More and to Heywood the epigrammatist, was a student at Lincoln’s Inn in his seventeenth year, but left it to squander his father’s fortune. He was a friend of Bacon, with whom he lived for five years, and also of Ben Jonson, who corresponded with him. When young, Donne had written a thesis to prove that suicide is no sin. “That,” he used to say in later years, “was written by Jack Donne, not by Dr. Donne.”

This same poet was for two years preacher at Lincoln’s Inn; so was the charitable and amiable Tillotson in 1663. The latter, after preaching the doctrine of non-resistance before King Charles II., was nicknamed “Hobbes in the pulpit;” he and Dr. Burnet both tried in vain to force the same doctrine on Lord William Russell when he was preparing for death. Tillotson, who was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1691 by King William, was a valued friend of Locke. Addison considered Tillotson’s three folio volumes of sermons to be the standard of English, and meant to make them the ground-work of a dictionary which he had projected. Warburton, a sterner critic, denies that the sermons are oratorical like Jeremy Taylor’s, or thoughtful like Barrow’s, but yet confesses them to be clear, rational, equable,[674] and certainly not without a noble simplicity.

Among the most eminent students of Lincoln’s Inn we must remember Sir Matthew Hale. After a wild and vain youth, Hale suddenly commenced studying sixteen hours a day,[675] and became so careless of dress that he was once seized by a pressgang. The sight of a friend who fell down in a fit from excessive drinking led to this honest man’s renouncing all revelry and becoming unchangeably religious. Noy directed him in his studies; he became a friend of Selden, and was one of the counsel for Strafford, Laud, and the king himself. Nevertheless, he obtained the esteem of Cromwell, who was tolerant of all shades of goodness. He died 1675-6. When a nobleman once complained to Charles II. that Hale would not discuss with him the arguments in his cause then before him, Charles replied, “Ods fish, man! he would have treated me just the same.”

Lord Chancellor Egerton, afterwards Lord Ellesmere, was of Lincoln’s Inn. His son became Earl of Bridgewater. He was a friend of Lord Bacon, and had a celebrated dispute with Chief Justice Coke as to whether “the Chancery can relieve by subpœna after a judgment at law in the same cause.” Prudent, discreet, and honest, Ellesmere was esteemed by both Elizabeth and James, and died at York House in 1617. Bishop Hacket says of him that “He neither did, spoke, nor thought anything in his life but what deserved praise.”[676] It is said that many persons used to go to the Chancery Court only to see and admire his venerable presence.

Sir Henry Spelman was admitted of Lincoln’s Inn. He was a friend of Dugdale, and one of our earliest students of Anglo-Saxon. He wrote much on civil law, sacrilege, and tithes. Aubrey tells us that he was thought a dunce at school, and did not seriously sit down to hard study till he was about forty. This eminent scholar died in 1641, and was interred with great solemnity in Westminster Abbey.

Shaftesbury, the subtle and dangerous, and one of the restorers of the king he afterwards worked so hard to depose, was of Lincoln’s Inn.

Ashmole, the great herald, antiquary, and numismatist, originally a London attorney, was married in Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, in 1668, to the daughter of his great colleague in topography and heraldry, Sir William Dugdale, the part compiler of the _Monasticon_.

In the chapel was buried Alexander Brome, a Royalist attorney, a translator of Horace, and a great writer of sharp songs against “The Rump,” who died in 1666. Here also--in loving companionship with him only because dead--rests that irritable Puritan lawyer, William Prynne. He twice lost an ear in the pillory, besides being branded on the cheek. He ultimately opposed Cromwell and aided the return of Charles, for which he was made Keeper of the Tower Records. His works amount to forty folio and quarto volumes. He left copies of them to the Lincoln’s Inn library. Needham calls him “the greatest paper-worm that ever crept into a library.” He died in his Lincoln’s Inn chambers in 1669. Wood computes that Prynne wrote as much as would amount to a sheet for every day of his life. His epitaph had been erased when Wood wrote the _Athenæ Oxonienses_ in 1691.

In the same chapel lies Secretary Thurloe, the son of an Essex rector and the faithful servant of Cromwell. He was admitted of Lincoln’s Inn in 1647, and in 1654 was chosen one of the masters of the upper bench. He died suddenly in his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn in 1668. Dr. Birch published several folio volumes of his _State Papers_. He seems to have been an honest, dull, plodding man. Thurloe’s chambers were at No. 24 in the south angle of the great court leading out of Chancery Lane, formerly called the Gatehouse Court, but now Old Buildings--the rooms on the left hand of the ground-floor. Here Thurloe had chambers from 1645 to 1659. Cromwell must have often come here to discuss dissolutions of Parliament and Dutch treaties. State papers sufficient to fill sixty-seven folio volumes were discovered in a false ceiling in the garret by a clergyman who had borrowed the chambers of a friend during the long vacation. He disposed of them to Lord Chancellor Somers.[677] Cautious old Thurloe had perhaps sown these papers, hoping to reap the harvest under some new Cromwellian dynasty that never came.

Rushworth the historian was a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn. During the Civil Wars he was assistant clerk to the House of Commons. After the Restoration he became secretary to the Lord Keeper, but falling into distress, died in the King’s Bench in 1690. His eight folio volumes of _Historical Collections_ are specially valuable.[678]

Sir John Denham also studied in this pasturing-ground of English genius; and here, after squandering all his money in gaming, he wrote an essay upon the vice that brings its own punishment. In 1641, when his tragedy of “The Sophy” appeared, Waller said that Denham had broken out like the Irish rebellion, threescore thousand strong. In 1643 appeared his “Cooper’s Hill” which the lampooners declared the author had bought of a vicar for forty pounds.[679] He became mad for a short time at the close of life, and was then ridiculed by Butler, so says Dr. Johnson. He died in 1668, and was interred in Westminster Abbey. Denham and Waller smoothed the way for Dryden,[680] and founded the Pope school of highly polished artificial verse. Denham’s noble apostrophe to the river Thames is all but perfect.

George Wither, one of our fine old poets of a true school, rougher but more natural than Denham’s, the son of a Hampshire farmer, entered at Lincoln’s Inn. Sent to the Marshalsea for his just but indiscreet satires, he turned soldier, fought against the Royalists, and became one of Cromwell’s dreaded major-generals. He was in Newgate for a long time after the Restoration, and died in 1667. When taken prisoner by Charles, Sir John Denham obtained his release on the humorous pretext that, while Wither lived, he (Denham) would not be the worst poet in England.[681]

In No. 1 New Square, Arthur Murphy, the friend of Dr. Johnson, resided for twenty-three years. He became a member of the inn in 1757. In 1788 he sold his chambers, and retired from the bar. As a journalist he was ridiculed by Wilkes and Churchill. His plays, “The Grecian Daughter” and “Three Weeks after Marriage,” were successful. He also translated Tacitus and Sallust. He died in 1805.[682]

Judge Fortescue, a great English lawyer of the time of Henry VI., was a student of this inn. He wrote his great work, _De Laudibus Legum Angliæ_ to educate Prince Edward when in banishment in Lorraine. This pious, loyal, and learned man, after being nominal Chancellor, returned to retirement in England, and acknowledged Edward IV.

The Earl of Mansfield belonged to the same illustrious inn. For elegance of mind, for honesty and industry, and for eloquence, he stands unrivalled. The proceedings against Wilkes, and the destruction of his house in Bloomsbury by the fanatical mob of 1780, were the chief events of his useful life.

Spencer Perceval was of Lincoln’s Inn. A son of the Earl of Egmont, he became a student here in 1782. In Parliament he supported Pitt and the war against Napoleon. In 1801, under the Addington ministry, he became Attorney-General, and persecuted Peltier for a libel on Bonaparte during the peace of Amiens. On the death of the Duke of Portland he was raised to the head of the Treasury, where he continued till May 1812, when he was shot through the heart in the lobby of the House of Commons by Bellingham, a bankrupt merchant of Archangel, who considered himself aggrieved because ministers had not taken his part and claimed redress for his losses from the Russian Government. Perceval was a shrewd, even-tempered lawyer, fluent and industrious, who, had time been permitted him, might possibly have proved more completely than he did his incapacity for high ministerial command.

George Canning became a student at Lincoln’s Inn in 1781. His father was a bankrupt wine-merchant who died of a broken heart. His mother was a provincial actress. His relation, Sheridan, introduced him to Fox, Grey, and Burke, the latter of whom, it is said, induced him to make politics his profession. He made his maiden speech, attacking Fox and supporting Pitt, in 1794. Late in life he gradually began to support some liberal measures. In 1827 he became First Lord of the Treasury, and died a few months afterwards in the zenith of his power.

Lord Lyndhurst was also one of the glories of this inn. The trial of Dr. Watson for treason, in 1817, first gained for this son of an American painter a reputation which, joined with his prudent conduct in the trial of Cashman the rioter led to his being appointed Solicitor-General in 1818. From that he rose in rapid succession, to the posts of Attorney-General, Master of the Rolls, Lord Chancellor, and Lord Lyndhurst. Old, eccentric, “irrepressible” Sir Charles Wetherell was Copley’s fellow-advocate in Watson’s case, that ended in the prisoner’s acquittal.[683] In 1827, when Abbott became Lord Tenterden, Copley accepted the Great Seal, displacing Lord Eldon, and joined Canning’s cabinet, becoming Lord Lyndhurst. In 1830 he became Chief Baron of the Exchequer.

Charles Pepys, Lord Cottenham, born 1781, was called to the bar by the Society of Lincoln’s Inn in 1804. He was appointed King’s Counsel in 1826, was made Solicitor-General in 1834, succeeded Sir John Leach as Master of the Rolls in the same year, and was elevated to the woolsack in 1836. This Chancellor, who was a very excellent lawyer, was descended from a branch of the family of Samuel Pepys, author of the celebrated _Diary_.

Sir E. Sugden was a member of Lincoln’s Inn. He was born in the year 1781. He was the son of a Westminster hairdresser who became rich by inventing a substitute for hair-powder. He was created Lord St. Leonards on the formation of a Conservative ministry in 1852, when he accepted the Great Seal.

Lord Brougham also studied in Lincoln’s Inn. He was born in 1778, and started the _Edinburgh Review_ in 1802. In 1820 he defended Queen Caroline; but it would take a volume to follow the career of this impetuous and versatile genius. His struggles for law-reform, for Catholic emancipation, for abolition of slavery, for the education of the people, and for Parliamentary reform, are matters of history. In his old age, though still vigorous, Lord Brougham grew tamer, and condemned the armed emancipation of slaves practised by the Northern States in the present American war. He died at his residence at Cannes in the South of France in 1868.

Cottenham and Campbell were students in Lincoln’s Inn; so was that eccentric reformer Jeremy Bentham, who was called to the bar in 1722, and was the son of a Houndsditch attorney; and so was Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania.

That “luminary of the Irish Church,”[684] Archbishop Ussher, was preacher at Lincoln’s Inn in 1647, the society giving the good man handsome rooms ready furnished. He continued to preach there for eight years, till his eyesight began to fail. He died in 1655, and was buried, by Cromwell’s permission, with great magnificence, in Erasmus’s chapel in Westminster Abbey. His library of 10,000 volumes, bought of him by Cromwell’s officers, was given by Charles II. to Dublin College. Ussher, when only eighteen, was the David who discomfited in public dispute the learned Jesuit Fitz-Simons. He saw Charles beheaded from the roof of a house on the site of the Admiralty.

Dr. Langhorne, the joint translator with his brother of the _Lives of Plutarch_, was assistant preacher at Lincoln’s Inn. An imitator of Sterne, and a writer in Griffiths’s _Monthly Review_, he was praised by Smollett and abused by Churchill. Langhorne’s amiable poem, _The Country Justice_, was praised by Scott. He died in 1779.

That fiery controversialist Warburton was preacher at Lincoln’s Inn in 1746, and the same year preached and published a sermon on the Highland rebellion. He was the son of an attorney at Newark-upon-Trent. His _Divine Legation_ was an effort to show that the absence of allusions in the writings of Moses to a system of rewards and punishments was a proof of their divine origin. The book is full of perverse digressions. His edition of Shakspere is, perhaps, to use a fine expression of Burke, “one of the poorest maggots that ever crept from the great man’s carcase.” Pope left half his library to Warburton, who had suggested to him the conclusion of the _Dunciad_. Wilkes, Bolingbroke, Dr. Louth, and Churchill were all by turns attacked by this arrogant knight-errant. Warburton died in 1779.

Reginald Heber, afterwards the excellent Bishop of Calcutta, was appointed preacher at Lincoln’s Inn in 1822, the year before he sailed for India. In 1826 this good man was found dead in his bath at Trichinopoly. The sudden death of this energetic missionary was a great loss to East Indian Christianity. In the “company of the preachers” we must not forget the excellent Dr. Van Mildert, afterwards Bishop of Durham, and Dr. Thomson the present Archbishop of York.

In the old times the Lord Chancellor held his sittings in the great hall of Lincoln’s Inn. Here, too, at the Christmas revels, the King of the Cockneys administered _his_ laws. Jack Straw, a sort of rebellious rival, was put down, with all his adherents, as a bad precedent for the Essexes and Norfolks of the inn, by wary Queen Elizabeth, who always kept a firm grip on her prerogative. In the same reign absurd sumptuary laws, vainly trying to fix the quicksilver of fashion, forbade the students to wear long hair, long beards, large ruffs, huge cloaks, or big spurs. The fine for wearing a beard of more than a fortnight’s growth was three shillings and fourpence.[685] In her father’s time beards had been prohibited under pain of double commons.

In the old hall, replaced by the new Tudor building, stood one of Hogarth’s most pretentious but worst pictures, “Paul preaching before Felix,” an ill-drawn and ludicrous caricature of epic work. The society paid for it. It is now rolled up and hid away with as much contumely as Kent’s absurdity at St. Clement’s when Hogarth parodied it.

The new hall of Lincoln’s Inn was built by Mr. P. Hardwick, the architect of the St. Katherine Docks, and was opened by the Queen in person in 1845. It is a fine Tudor building of red brick, with stone dressings. The hall is 120 feet, the library 80 feet long. The contract was taken for £55,000, but its cost exceeded that sum. The library contains the unique fourth volume of Prynne’s _Records_, which the society bought for £335 at the Stow sale in 1849, and all Sir Matthew Hale’s bequests of books and MSS.: “a treasure,” says that “excellent good man,” as Evelyn calls him[686] in his will, “that is not fit for every man’s view.” The hall contains a fresco representing the “Lawgivers of the World,” by Watts. The gardens were much curtailed by the erection of the hall, and their quietude destroyed. Ben Jonson talks of the walks under the elms.[687] Steele seems to have been fond of this garden when he felt meditative. In May 1709, he says much hurry and business having perplexed him into a mood too thoughtful for company, instead of the tavern “I went into Lincoln’s Inn Walk, and having taken a round or two, I sat down, according to the allowed familiarity of these places, on a bench.” In a more thoughtful month (November) of the same year he goes again for a solitary walk in the garden, “a favour that is indulged me by several of the benchers, who are very intimate friends, and grown old in the neighbourhood.” It was this bright frosty night, when the whole body of air had been purified into “bright transparent æther,” that Steele imagined his vision of “The Return of the Golden Age.”

Brave old Ben Jonson was the son of a Scotch gentleman in Henry VIII.’s service, who, impoverished by the persecutions of Queen Mary, took orders late in life. His mother married for the second time a small builder or master bricklayer. He went to Westminster school, where Camden, the great antiquary, was his master. A kind patron sent him to Cambridge.[688] He seems to have left college prematurely, and have come back to London to work with his father-in-law.[689]

There is an old tradition that he worked at the garden-wall of Lincoln’s Inn next to Chancery Lane, and that a knight or bencher (Sutton, or Camden), walking by, hearing him repeat a passage of Homer, entered into conversation with him, and finding him to have extraordinary wit, sent him back to college; or, as Fuller quaintly puts it, “some gentlemen pitying that his parts should be buried under the rubbish of so mean a calling, did by their bounty manumise him freely to follow his own ingenious inclinations.”[690]

Gifford sneers at the story, for the poet’s own words to Drummond of Hawthornden were simply these:--“He could not endure the occupation of a bricklayer,” and therefore joined Vere in Flanders, probably going with reinforcements to Ostend in 1591-2.[691] He there fought and slew an enemy, and stripped him in sight of both armies. On his return, he became an actor at a Shoreditch theatre. His enemies, the rival satirists, frequently sneer at the quondam profession of Ben Jonson, and describe him stamping on the stage as if he were treading mortar. For myself, I admire brave, truculent old Ben, and delight even in his most crabbed and pedantic verse, and therefore never pass Lincoln’s Inn garden without thinking of Shakspere’s honest but rugged friend--“a bear only in the coat.”

On June 27, 1752, there was a dreadful fire in New Square, which destroyed countless historical treasures, including Lord Somers’s original letters and papers.

At No. 2 and afterwards at No. 6 New Square, Lincoln’s Inn, which is built on Little Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and forms no part of the Inn of court, lived Sir Samuel Romilly. This “great and amiable man,” as Tom Moore calls him, killed himself in a fit of melancholy produced by overwork joined to the loss of his wife, “a simple, gay, unlearned woman.” Sir Samuel was a stern, reserved man, and she was the only person in the world to whom he could unbosom himself. When he lost her, he said, “the very vent of his heart was stopped up.”[692]

It was in Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn, that Benjamin Disraeli, born in December 1805, much too erratic for Plowden and Coke, used to come to study conveyancing at the chambers of Mr. Bassevi. He is described as often arriving with Spenser’s _Faerie Queen_ under his arm, stopping an hour or two to read, and then leaving. This led, as might be expected, not to the woolsack but to the authorship of _Coningsby_. His Premiership and his Patent of Peerage as Lord Beaconsfield, are due to other causes.

Whetstone Park, now a small quiet passage, full of printing-offices and stables, between Great Turnstile and Gate Street, derived its name from a vestryman of the time of Charles I. It is now chiefly occupied by mews, but was once filled by infamous houses and low brandy-shops.

In 1671, the Duke of Monmouth, the Duke of Grafton, and the Duke of St. Alban’s, three of King Charles II.’s illegitimate sons, killed here a beadle in a drunken brawl. A street-ballad was written on the occasion, more full of spite against the corrupt court than of sympathy with the slain man. In poor doggerel the Catnach of 1671 describes the watch coming in, disturbed from sleep, to appease their graces--

“Straight rose mortal jars,
’Twixt the night blackguard and (the) silver stars;
Then fell the beadle by a ducal hand,
For daring to pronounce the saucy ‘Stand!’”

Sadly enough, the silly fellow’s death led to a dance at Whitehall being put off,--

“Disappoints the queen, ‘poor little chuck!’”[693]

and all the brisk courtiers in their gay coats bought with the nation’s subsidies.

The last two lines are vigorous, sarcastic, and worthy of a humble imitator of Dryden. The poet sums up--

“Yet shall Whitehall, the innocent and good,
See these men dance, all daubed with lace and blood.”

In 1682 the misnamed “Park” grew so infamous, that a countryman, having been decoyed into one of the houses and robbed, went into Smithfield and collected an angry mob of about 500 apprentices, who marched on Whetstone Park, broke open the houses, and destroyed the furniture. The constables and watchmen, being outnumbered, sent for the king’s guard, who dispersed them and took eleven of them. Nevertheless, the next night another mob stormed the place, again broke in the doors, smashed the windows, and cut the feather-beds to pieces.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields formed part of the ancient Fickett’s Fields, a plot of ground of about ten acres, extending formerly from Bell Yard to Portugal Street and Carey Street. It seems to have been used in the Middle Ages for jousts and tournaments by the Templars and Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, to the priory of which last order it belonged till Henry VIII. dissolved the monasteries, when it was granted to Anthony Stringer. In an inquest of the time of James I. it is described as having two gates for horses and carriages at the east end--one gate leading into Chancery Lane, the other gate at the western end.[694]

Queen Elizabeth, afraid that London was growing unwieldly, issued several proclamations against further building. James I., still more timid and conservative, and not thoroughly acquainted with his own capital, issued a like absurd ukase in 1612, by the desire of the benchers and students of Lincoln’s Inn, forbidding the erection of new houses in these fields. But no royal edict can prevent a demand for creating a supply, and as the building still went on, a commission was appointed in 1618 to lay out the square in a regular plan. Bacon, then Lord Chancellor, and many noblemen, judges, and masters in Chancery, were on this commission, and Inigo Jones, the king’s Surveyor-General, drew up the scheme. The report of this body, given by Rymer, sets out that in the last sixteen years there had been more building near and about the City of London than in ages before, and that as these fields were much surrounded by the dwellings and lodgings of noblemen and gentlemen of quality, “all small cottages and closes shall be paid for and removed, and the square shall be reduced,” both for sweetness, uniformity, and comeliness, as an ornament to the City, and for the health and recreation of the inhabitants, into walks and partitions, as Mr. Inigo Jones should in his map devise.[695]

There is a tradition that the area of the square, according to Inigo Jones’s plan, was to have been made the exact dimensions of the base of the great pyramid of Geezeh. The tradition is probably true, for the area of the pyramid is 535,824 square feet, and that of Lincoln’s Inn Fields 550,000.[696] The height of the pyramid was 756 feet.

The plan proved too costly, and the subscriptions began probably to fail; but in the course of time noblemen and others began to build for themselves, but without much regard to uniformity.

The elevation of Inigo’s plan for the Fields, painted in oil colours, is still preserved at Wilton House, near Salisbury. The view is taken from the south, and the principal feature in the elevation is Lindsey House in the centre of the west side, whose stone façade, still existing, stands boldly out from the brick houses which support it on either side. The internal accommodation of Lindsey House was never good.[697]

These fields in Charles I.’s time became the haunt of wrestlers, bowlers, beggars, and idle boys; and here, in 1624, Lilly the astrologer, then servant to a mantua-maker in the Strand, spent his time in bowling with Wat the cobbler, Dick the blacksmith, and such idle apprentices. Hither, after the Restoration, came every sort of villain--the Rufflers, or maimed soldiers, who told lies of Edgehill and Naseby, and who surrounded the coaches of charitable lords; “Dommerers,” or sham dumb men; “Mumpers,” or sham broken gentlemen; “Whipjacks,” or sham seamen with bound-up legs; “Abram-men,” or sham idiots; “Fraters,” or rogues with forged patents; “Anglers,” wild rogues, “Clapper-dudgeons,”[698] and men with gambling wheels of fortune.

In Queen Anne’s reign Gay sketches the dangers of night in these fields; he warns his readers to avoid the lurking thief, by day a beggar, or else--

“The crutch, which late compassion moved, shall wound
Thy bleeding head, and fell thee to the ground.

Nor trust the linkman,” he adds, “along the lonely wall, or he’ll put out his light and rob you, but--

“Still keep the public streets where oily rays
That from the crystal lamp o’erspread the ways.”

The south side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields was built and named three years before the Restoration, by Sir William Cowper, James Cowper, and Robert Henley. In 1668 Portugal Row, as it was called, but not from Charles’s queen,[699] was extremely fashionable. There were then living here such noble and noted persons as Lady Arden, William Perpoint, Esq., Sir Charles Waldegrave, Lady Fitzharding, Lady Diana Curzon, Serjeant Maynard, Lord Cardigan, Mrs. Anne Heron, Lady Mordant, Richard Adams, Esq., Lady Carr, Lady Wentworth, Mr. Attorney Montagu, Lady Coventry, Judge Welch, and Lady Davenant.[700]

Mr. Serjeant Maynard was the brave old Presbyterian lawyer, then eighty-seven, who replied to the Prince of Orange, when he said that he must have outlived all the men of law of his time--“Sir, I should have outlived the law itself had not your highness come over.”

Lady Davenant was the widow of Sir William Davenant, the Oxford innkeeper’s son, the poet and manager, who, aided by Whitlocke and Maynard, was allowed in Cromwell’s time to perform operas at a theatre in Charterhouse Square. After the Restoration he had the theatre in Portugal Street. He died in 1668, insolvent. His poems were published by his widow, and dedicated to the Duke of York in 1673.

Lord Cardigan was the father of the infamous Countess of Shrewsbury, who is said, disguised as a page, to have held her lover the Duke of Buckingham’s horse while he killed her husband in a duel near Barn Elms. The Earl of Rochester lived in the house next the Duke’s Theatre,[701] which stood behind the present College of Surgeons, as Davenant says in one of his epilogues--

“The prospect of the sea cannot be shown,
Therefore be pleased to think that you are all
Behind the row which men call Portugal.”

In September 1586 Ballard, Babington, and other conspirators against the life of Queen Elizabeth were put to death in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Babington was a young man of good family, who had been a page to the Earl of Shrewsbury, and had plotted to rescue Mary and assassinate Elizabeth. His plot discovered, he had fled to St. John’s Wood for concealment. Seven of these plotters were hanged on the first day, and seven on the second. The last seven were allowed to die, by special grace, before being disembowelled by the executioner.

It was through these fields that, one spring night in 1676-7, Thomas Sadler, an impudent and well-known thief, rivalling the audacity of Blood, having with some confederates stolen the mace and purse of Lord Chancellor Finch from his house in Great Queen Street, bore them in mock procession on their way to their lodgings in Knightrider Street, Doctors’ Commons. Sadler was hanged at Tyburn for this theft.

Lord William Russell was son of William, Earl of Bedford, by Lady Ann Carr, daughter of Carr, Earl of Somerset. He was beheaded in the centre of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, July 21, 1683, the last year but two of the reign of King Charles II., for being, as it was alleged, engaged in a plot to attack the guards and kill the king, on his return from Newmarket races, at the Rye House Farm, in a by-road near Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire, about seventeen miles north-east of London.

The Whig party, in their eagerness to restrain the Papists and exclude the Duke of York from the throne, had gone too far, and their zeal for the Dissenters had produced a violent reaction in the High Church party. Charles and the Duke, taking advantage of the return tide, began to persecute the Dissenters, denounce Shaftesbury, assail the liberties of the City, and finally dissolved the Parliament. Soon after this, that subtle politician, Shaftesbury, finding it impossible to rouse the Duke of Monmouth, Essex, or Lord Russell, denounced them all as sold and deceived, and fled to Holland.

After his flight, meetings of his creatures were held at the chambers of one West, an active talking man. Keeling, a vintner of decaying business, betrayed the plot, as also did Lord Howard, a man so infamous that Charles himself said “he would not hang the worst dog he had upon his evidence.” Keeling and his brother swore that forty men were hired to intercept the king, but that a fire at Newmarket, which had hastened Charles’s return, had defeated their plans. Goodenough, an ex-sheriff, had told them that the Duke of Monmouth and other great men were to raise 4000 soldiers and £20,000. The brothers also swore that Goodenough had told them that Lord Russell had joined in the design of killing the king and the duke.

Lord Russell acted with great composure. He would not fly, refused to let his friends surrender themselves to share his fortunes, and told an acquaintance that “he was very sensible he should fall a sacrifice.”[702] When he appeared at the council, the king himself said that “nobody suspected Lord Russell of any design against his own person, but that he had good evidence of his being in designs against his government.” The prisoner denied all knowledge of the intended insurrection, or of the attempt to surprise the guards.

The infamous Jeffries was one of the counsel for his prosecution. Lord Russell argued at his trial, that, allowing he had compassed the king’s death, which he denied, he had been guilty only of a conspiracy to levy war, which was not treason except by a recent statute of Charles II., the prosecutions upon which were limited to a certain time, which had elapsed,[703] so that both law and justice were in this case violated.

The truth seems to be that Lord Russell was a true patriot, of a slow and sober judgment, a taciturn, good man, of not the quickest intelligence, who had allowed himself to listen to dangerous and random talk for the sake of political purposes. He wished to debar the duke from the throne, but he had never dreamt of accomplishing his purpose by murder. It has since been discovered that Sidney, doing evil that good might come, had accepted secret-service money from France, and that Russell himself had interviews with French agents. Lord John Russell explains away this charge very well. Charles was degraded enough to take money from France. The patriots, told that Louis XIV. wished to avoid a war, intrigued with the French king to maintain peace, fearing that if Charles once raised an army under any pretence, he would first employ it to obtain absolute power at home, which it is most probable he would have done.[704] On the whole, these disingenuous interviews must be lamented; they could not and they did not lead to good. It has been justly regretted also that Lord Russell on his trial did not boldly denounce the tyranny of the court, and show the necessity that had existed for active opposition.

After sentence the condemned man wrote petitions to the king and duke, which were unjustly sneered at as abject. They really, however, contain no promise but that of living beyond sea and meddling no more in English affairs. Of one of them at least, Burnet says it was written at the earnest solicitation of Lady Rachel; and Lord Russell himself said, with regret, “This will be printed and sold about the streets as my submission when I am led out to be hanged.” He lamented to Burnet that his wife beat every bush and ran about so for his preservation; but he acquiesced in what she did when he thought it would be afterwards a mitigation of her sorrow.

When his brave and excellent wife, the daughter of Charles I.’s loyal servant, Southampton, who was the son of Shakspere’s friend, begged for her husband’s life, the king replied, “How can I grant that man six weeks, who would not have granted me six hours?”[705]

There is no scene in history that “goes more directly to the heart,” says Fox, “than the story of the last days of this excellent man.” The night before his death it rained hard, and he said, “Such a rain to-morrow will spoil a great show,” which was a dull thing on a rainy day. He thought a violent death only the pain of a minute, not equal to that of drawing a tooth; and he was still of opinion _that the king was limited by law, and that when he broke through those limits, his subjects might defend themselves and restrain him_.[706] He then received the sacrament from Tillotson with much devotion, and parted from his wife with a composed silence; as soon as she was gone he exclaimed, “The bitterness of death is past,” saying what a blessing she had been to him, and what a misery it had been if she had tried to induce him to turn an informer. He slept soundly that night and rose in a few hours, but would take no care in dressing. He prayed six or seven times by himself, and drank a little tea and some sherry. He then wound up his watch, and said, “Now I have done with time and shall go into eternity.” When told that he should give the executioner ten guineas, he said, with a smile, that it was a pretty thing to give a fee to have his head cut off. When the sheriffs came at ten o’clock, Lord Russell embraced Lord Cavendish, who had offered to change clothes with him and stay in his place in prison, or to attack the coach with a troop of horse and carry off his friend; but the noble man would not listen to either proposal.

In the street some in the crowd wept, while others insulted him. He said, “I hope I shall quickly see a better assembly.” He then sang, half to himself, the beginning of the 149th Psalm. As the coach turned into Little Queen Street, he said, looking at his own house, “I have often turned to the one hand with great comfort, but now I turn to this with greater,” and then a tear or two fell from his eyes. As they entered Lincoln’s Inn Fields he said, “This has been to me a place of sinning, and God now makes it the place of my punishment.” When he came to the scaffold, he walked about it four or five times: then he prayed by himself, and also with Tillotson; then he partly undressed himself, laid his head down without any change of countenance, and it was cut off in two strokes. Lord William’s walking-stick and a cotemporary account of his death are kept at Woburn Abbey.

Lady Rachel Russell, the excellent wife of this patriot, had been his secretary during the trial. She spent her after-life, not in unwisely lamenting the inevitable past, but in doing good works, and in educating her children. Writing two months after the execution to Dr. Fritzwilliams, this noble woman says:[707] “_Secretly_, my heart mourns and cannot be comforted, because I have not the dear companion and sharer of all my joys and sorrows. I want him to talk with, to walk with, to eat and sleep with. All these things are irksome to me now; all company and meals I could avoid, if it might be.... When I see my children before me, I remember the pleasure he took in them: this makes my heart shrink.”

In 1692 Lady Russell appears to have regained her composure. But she had other trials in store: for in 1711 she lost her only son, the Duke of Bedford, in the flower of his age, and six months afterwards one of her daughters died in childbed.

It is said that, in his hour of need, James II. was mean enough to say to the Duke of Bedford, “My lord, you are an honest man, have great credit, and can do me signal service.” “Ah, sir,” replied the duke, with a grave severity, “I am old and feeble now, but I once had a _son_.”

The Sacheverell riots culminated in these now quiet Fields. In 1710 Daniel Dommaree, a queen’s waterman, Francis Willis, a footman, and George Purchase, were tried at the Old Bailey for heading a riot during the Sacheverell trial and pulling down meeting-houses. This Sacheverell was an ignorant, impudent incendiary, the adopted son of a Marlborough apothecary, and was impeached by the House of Commons for preaching at St. Andrew’s, Holborn, sermons denouncing the Revolution of 1688. His sermons were ordered to be burnt, and he was sentenced to be suspended for three years. Atterbury helped the mischievous firebrand in his ineffectual defence, and Swift wrote a most scurrilous letter to Bishop Fleetwood, who had lamented the excesses of the mob. Sacheverell had been at Oxford with Addison, who inscribed a poem to him. During the trial, a mob marched from the Temple, whither they had escorted Sacheverell, pulled down Dr. Burgess’s meeting-house, and threw the pulpit, sconces, and gallery pews into a fire in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, some waving curtains on poles, shouting, “High Church standard!” “Huzza! High Church and Sacheverell!” “We will have them all down!” They also burnt other meeting-houses in Leather Lane, Drury Lane, and Fetter Lane, and made bonfires of the woodwork in the streets. They were eventually dispersed by the horse-grenadiers and horse-guards and foot. Dommaree was sentenced to death, but pardoned; Willis was acquitted; and Purchase was pardoned.[708]

Wooden posts and rails stood round the Fields till 1735, when an Act was passed to enable the inhabitants to make improvements, to put an iron gate at each corner, and to erect dwarf walls and iron palisades.[709] Before this time grooms used to break in horses on this spot. One day while looking at these centaurs, Sir Joseph Jekyll, who had brought a very obnoxious bill into Parliament in 1736 in order to raise the price of gin, was mobbed, thrown down, and dangerously trampled on. His initials, “J. J.,” figure under a gibbet chalked on a wall in one of Hogarth’s prints.[710] Macaulay’s _History_ contains a very highly coloured picture of these Fields. A comparison of the passage with the facts from which it is drawn would be a useful lesson to all historical students who love truth in its severity.[711]

Newcastle House stands at the north-west angle of the Fields, at the south-eastern corner of Great Queen Street. It derived its name from John Holles, Duke of Newcastle, a relative of the noble families of Vere, Cavendish, and Holles. This duke bought the house before 1708, but died in 1711 without issue, and was succeeded in the house by his nephew, the leader of the Pelham administration under George II.

The house had been bought by Lord Powis about 1686. It was built for him by Captain William Winde, a scholar of Webbe’s, the pupil and executor of Inigo Jones.[712] William Herbert, first Marquis of Powis, was outlawed and fled to St. Germain’s to James II., who made him Duke of Powis. Government had thought of buying the house when it was inhabited by the Lord Keeper, Sir Nathan Wright,[713] and to have settled it officially on the Great Seal. It was once the residence of Sir John Somers, the Lord Chancellor.

In 1739 Lady Henrietta Herbert, widow of Lord William Herbert, second son of the Marquis of Powis, and daughter of James, first Earl of Waldegrave, was married to Mr. John Beard,[714] who seems to have been a fine singer and a most charitable, estimable man. Lady Henrietta’s grandmother was the daughter of James II. by the sister of the great Duke of Marlborough. Dr. Burner speaks of Beard’s great knowledge of music and of his intelligence as an actor.[715] In an epitaph on him, still extant, the writer says--

“Whence had that voice such magic to control?
’Twas but the echo of a well-tuned soul;
Through life his morals and his music ran
In symphony, and spoke the virtuous man.
... Go, gentle harmonist! our hopes approve,
To meet and hear thy sacred songs above;
When taught by thee, the stage of life well trod,
We rise to raptures round the throne of God.”

Beard, excellent both in oratorios and serious and comic operas, became part proprietor of Covent Garden Theatre, and died in 1791.

The Duke of Newcastle’s crowded levées were his pleasure and his triumph. He generally made people of business wait two or three hours in the ante-chamber while he trifled with insignificant favourites in his closet. When at last he entered the levée room, he accosted, hugged, embraced, and promised everything to everybody with an assumed cordiality and a degrading familiarity.[716]

“Long” Sir Thomas Robertson was a great intruder on the duke’s time; if told that he was out, he would come in to look at the clock or play with the monkey, in hopes of the great man relenting. The servants, at last tired out with Sir Thomas, concocted a formula of repulses, and the next time he came the porter, without waiting for his question, began--“Sir, his grace is gone out, the fire has gone out, the clock stands, and the monkey is dead.”[717]

Sir Timothy Waldo, on his way from the duke’s dinner-table to his own carriage, once gave the cook, who was waiting in the hall, a crown. The rogue returned it, saying he did not take silver. “Oh, don’t you, indeed?” said Sir Timothy, coolly replacing it in his pocket; “then I don’t give gold.” Jonas Hanway, the great opponent of tea-drinking, published eight letters to the duke on this subject,[718] and the custom began from that time to decline. But Hogarth had already condemned the exaction.

The duke was very profuse in his promises, and a good story is told of the result of his insincerity. At a Cornish election, the duke had obtained the turning vote for his candidate by his usual assurances. The elector, wishing to secure something definite, had asked for a supervisorship of excise for his son-in-law on the present holder’s death. “The moment he dies,” said the premier, “set out post-haste for London; drive directly to my house in the Fields: night or day, sleeping or waking, dead or alive, thunder at the door; the porter will show you upstairs directly; and the place is yours.” A few months after the old supervisor died, and up to London rushed the Cornish elector.

Now that very night the duke had been expecting news of the death of the King of Spain, and had left orders before he went to bed to have the courier sent up directly he arrived. The Cornish man, mistaken for this important messenger, was instantly, to his great delight, shown up to the duke’s bedroom. “Is he dead?--is he dead?” cried the duke. “Yes, my lord, yes,” answered the aspirant, promptly. “When did he die?” “The day before yesterday, at half-past one o’clock, after three weeks in his bed, and taking a power of doctor’s stuff; and I hope your grace will be as good as your word, and let my son-in-law succeed him.” “_Succeed him!_” shouted the duke; “is the man drunk or mad? Where are your despatches?” he exclaimed, tearing back the bed-curtains; and there, to his vexation, stood the blundering elector, hat in hand, his stupid red face beaming with smiles as he kept bowing like a joss. The duke sank back in a violent fit of laughter, which, like the electric fluid, was in a moment communicated to his attendants.[719] It is not stated whether the Cornish man obtained his petition.