"At the Temple one day, Sherlock taking a boat,The waterman asked him, 'Which way will you float?''Which way?' says the Doctor; 'why, fool, with the stream!'To St. Paul's or to Lambeth was all one to him."
The tide in favour of Sherlock was running to St. Paul's. He was made Bishop of London.
During the repairs of 1827 the ancient freestone chapel of St. Anne, which stood on the south side of the "Round," was ruthlessly removed. We had less reverence for antiquity then. The upper storey communicated with the Temple Church by a staircase opening on the west end of the south aisle of the choir; the lower joined the "Round" by a doorway under one of the arches of the circular arcade. The chapel anciently opened upon the cloisters, and formed a private way from the convent to the church. Here the Papal legate and the highest bishops frequently held conferences; and on Sunday mornings the Master of the Temple held chapters, enjoined penances, made up quarrels, and pronounced absolution. The chapel of St. Anne was in the old time much resorted to by barren women, who there prayed for children.
In Charles II.'s time, according to "Hudibras," "straw bail" and low rascals of that sort lingered about the Round, waiting for hire. Butler says:—
"Retain all sorts of witnessesThat ply i' the Temple, under trees,Or walk the Round with Knights o' th' Posts,About the cross-legg'd knights, their hosts;Or wait for customers betweenThe pillar rows in Lincoln's Inn."
In James I.'s time the Round, as we find in Ben Jonson, was a place for appointments; and in 1681 Otway describes bullies of Alsatia, with flapping hats pinned up on one side, sandy, weather-beaten periwigs, and clumsy iron swords clattering at their heels, as conspicuous personages among the Knights of the Posts and the other peripatetic philosophers of the Temple walks.
We must now turn to the history of the whole precinct. When the proud Order was abolished by the Pope, Edward II. granted the Temple to Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, who, however, soon surrendered it to the king's cousin, the Earl of Lancaster, who let it, at their special request, to the students and professors of the common laws; the colony then gradually becoming an organised and collegiate body, Edward I. having authorised laymen for the first time to read and plead causes.
Hugh le Despenser for a time held the Temple, and on his execution Edward III. appointed the Mayor of London its guardian. The mayor closing the watergate caused much vexation to the lawyers rowing by boat to Westminster, and the king had to interfere. In 1333 the king farmed out the Temple rents at £25 a year. In the meantime, the Knights Hospitallers, affecting to be offended at the desecration of holy ground—the Bishop of Ely's lodgings, a chapel dedicated to à Becket, and the door to the Temple Hall—claimed the forfeited spot. The king granted their request, the annual revenue of the Temple then being £73 6s. 11d., equal to about £1,000 of our present money. In 1340, in consideration of £100 towards an expedition to France, the warlike king made over the residue of the Temple to the Hospitallers, who instantly endowed the church with lands and one thousand fagots a year from Lillerton Wood to keep up the church fires.
In this reign Chaucer, who is supposed to have been a student of the Middle Temple, and who is said to have once beaten an insolent Franciscan friar in Fleet Street, gives a eulogistic sketch of a Temple manciple, or purveyor of provisions, in the prologue to his wonderful "Canterbury Tales."
"A gentil manciple was there of the TempleOf whom achatours mighten take ensample,For to ben wise in bying of vitàille;For, whether that he paid or toke by taille,Algate he waited so in his achateThat he was aye before in good estate.Now is not that of God a full fayre graceThat swiche a lewèd mannès wit shall faceThe wisdom of an hepe of lerned men?"Of maisters had he more than thries ten,That were of law expert and curious;Of which there was a dosein in that housWorthy to ben stewardes of rent and landOf any lord that is in Engleland:To maken him live by his propre good,In honour detteles; but if he were wood,Or live as scarsly as him list desire,And able for to helpen all a shire,In any cos that mighte fallen or happe:And yet this manciple sett 'hir aller cappe.'"
In the Middle Temple Chaucer is supposed to have formed the acquaintanceship of his graver contemporary, "the moral Gower."
TOMBS OF KNIGHTS TEMPLARS
Many of the old retainers of the Templars became servants of the new lawyers, who had ousted their masters. The attendants at table were still called paniers, as they had formerly been. The dining in pairs, the expulsion from hall for misconduct, and the locking out of chambers were old customs also kept up. The judges of Common Pleas retained the title of knight, and the Fratres Servientes of the Templars arose again in the character of learned serjeants-at-law, the coif of the modern serjeant being the linen coif of the old Freres Serjens of the Temple. The coif was never, as some suppose, intended to hide the tonsure of priests practising law contrary to ecclesiastical prohibition. The old ceremony of creating serjeants-at-law exactly resembles that once used for receiving Fratres Servientes into the fraternity of the Temple.
In Wat Tyler's rebellion the wild men of Kent poured down on the dens of the Temple lawyers, pulled down their houses, carried off the books, deeds, and rolls of remembrance, and burnt them in Fleet Street, to spite the Knights Hospitallers. Walsingham, the chronicler, indeed, says that the rebels—who, by the by, claimed only their rights—had resolved to decapitate all the lawyers of London, to put an end to all the laws that had oppressed them, and to clear the ground for better times. In the reign of Henry VI. the overgrown society of the Temple divided into two halls, or rather the original two halls of the knights and Fratres Servientes separated into two societies. Brooke, the Elizabethan antiquary, says: "To this day, in memory of the old custom, the benchers or ancients of the one society dine once every year in the hall of the other society."
Sir John Fortescue, Chief Justice of the King's Bench in the reign of Henry VI., computed the annual expenses of each law student at more than £28—("£450 of our present money"—Addison). The students were all gentlemen by birth, and at each Inn of Court there was an academy, where singing, music, and dancing were taught. On festival days, after the offices of the Church, the students employed themselves in the study of history and in reading the Scriptures. Any student expelled one society was refused admission to any of the other societies. A manuscript (temp.Henry VIII.) in the Cotton Library dwells much on the readings, mootings, boltings, and other practices of the Temple students, and analyses the various classes of benchers, readers, cupboardmen, inner barristers, outer barristers, and students. The writer also mentions the fact that in term times the students met to talk law and confer on business in the church, which was, he says, as noisy as St. Paul's. When the plague broke out the students went home to the country.
The Society of the Inner Temple was very active (says Mr. Foss) during the reign of Henry VIII. in the erection of new buildings. Several houses for chambers were constructed near the library, and were called Pakington's Rents, from the name of the treasurer who superintended them. Henry Bradshaw, treasurer in the twenty-sixth year, gave his name to another set then built, which it kept until Chief Baron Tanfield resided there in the reign of James I., since which it has been called Tanfield Court. Other improvements were made about the same period, one of these being the construction of a new ceiling to the hall and the erection of a wall between the garden and the Thames.
The attention paid by the governors of the house both to the morals and dress of its members is evidenced by the imposition, in the thirteenth year of the reign of Henry VIII., of a fine of 6s. 8d. on any one who should exercise the plays of "shove-grote" or "slyp-grote," and by the mandate afterwards issued in the thirty-eighth year of the same reign, that students should reform themselves in their cut, or disguised apparel, and should not have long beards.
THE TEMPLE IN 1671. (FROM AN OLD BIRD'S-EYE VIEW IN THE INNER TEMPLE.)
It is in the Temple Gardens that Shakespeare—relying, probably, on some old tradition which does not exist in print—has laid one of the scenes of hisKing Henry VI.—that, namely, in which the partisans of the rival houses of York and Lancaster first assume their distinctive badges of the white and red roses:—
"Suffolk.Within the Temple Hall we were too loud;The garden here is more convenient.* * * * *"Plantagenet.Let him that is a true-born gentleman,And stands upon the honour of his birth,If he suppose that I have pleaded truth,From off this brier pluck a white rose with me."Somerset.Let him that is no coward, nor no flatterer,But dare maintain the party of the truth,Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me.* * * * *"Plantagenet.Hath not thy rose a canker, Somerset?"Somerset.Hath not thy rose a thorn, Plantagenet?* * * * *"Warwick.This brawl to-day,Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden,Shall send, between the red rose and the white,A thousand souls to death and deadly night."
King Henry VI., Part I., Act ii., sc. 4.
The books of the Middle Temple do not commence till the reign of King Henry VII., the first treasurer named in them being John Brooke, in the sixteenth year of Henry VII. (1500-1). Readers were not appointed till the following year, the earliest being John Vavasour—probably son of the judge, and not, as Dugdale calls him, the judge himself, who had then been on the bench for twelve years. Members of the house might be excused from living in commons on account of their wives being in town, or for other special reasons (Foss).
In the last year of Philip and Mary (1558) eight gentlemen of the Temple were expelled the society and committed to the Fleet for wilful disobedience to the Bench, but on their humble submission they were readmitted. A year before this a severe Act of Parliament was passed, prohibiting Templars wearing beards of more thanthree weeks' growth, upon pain of a forty-shilling fine, and double for every week after monition. The young lawyers were evidently getting too foppish. They were required to cease wearing Spanish cloaks, swords, bucklers, rapiers, gowns, hats, or daggers at their girdles. Only knights and benchers were to display doublets or hose of any light colour, except scarlet and crimson, or to affect velvet caps, scarf-wings to their gowns, white jerkins, buskins, velvet shoes, double shirt-cuffs, or feathers or ribbons in their caps. More over, no attorney was to be admitted into either house. These monastic rules were intended to preserve the gravity of the profession, and must have pleased the Poloniuses and galled the Mercutios of those troublous days.
In Elizabeth's days Master Gerard Leigh, a pedantic scholar of the College of Heralds, persuaded the misguided Inner Temple to abandon the old Templar arms—a plain red cross on a shield argent, with a lamb bearing the banner of the sinless profession, surmounted by a red cross. The heraldic euphuist substituted for this a flying Pegasus striking out the fountain of Hippocrene with its hoofs, with the appended motto of "Volat ad astera virtus," a recondite allusion to men, like Chaucer and Gower, who, it is said, had turned from lawyers to poets.
THE TEMPLE (continued)
The Middle Temple Hall: its Roof, Busts, and Portraits—Manningham's Diary—Fox Hunts in Hall—The Grand Revels—Spenser—Sir J. Davis—A Present to a King—Masques and Royal Visitors at the Temple—Fires in the Temple—The Last Great Revel in the Hall—Temple Anecdotes—The Gordon Riots—John Scott and his Pretty Wife—Colman "Keeping Terms"—Blackstone's "Farewell"—Burke—Sheridan—A Pair of Epigrams—Hare Court—The Barber's Shop—Johnson and the Literary Club—Charles Lamb—Goldsmith: his Life, Troubles, and Extravagances—"Hack Work" for Booksellers—The Deserted Village—She Stoops to Conquer—Goldsmith's Death and Burial.
The Middle Temple Hall: its Roof, Busts, and Portraits—Manningham's Diary—Fox Hunts in Hall—The Grand Revels—Spenser—Sir J. Davis—A Present to a King—Masques and Royal Visitors at the Temple—Fires in the Temple—The Last Great Revel in the Hall—Temple Anecdotes—The Gordon Riots—John Scott and his Pretty Wife—Colman "Keeping Terms"—Blackstone's "Farewell"—Burke—Sheridan—A Pair of Epigrams—Hare Court—The Barber's Shop—Johnson and the Literary Club—Charles Lamb—Goldsmith: his Life, Troubles, and Extravagances—"Hack Work" for Booksellers—The Deserted Village—She Stoops to Conquer—Goldsmith's Death and Burial.
In the glorious reign of Elizabeth the old Middle Temple Hall was converted into chambers, and a new hall built. The present roof (says Mr. Peter Cunningham) is the best piece of Elizabethan architecture in London. The screen, in the Renaissance style, was long supposed to be an exact copy of the Strand front of Old Somerset House; but this is a vulgar error; nor could it have been made of timber from the Spanish Armada, for the simple reason that it was set up thirteen years before the Armada was organised. The busts of "doubting" Lord Eldon and his brother, Lord Stowell, the great Admiralty judge, are by Behnes. The portraits are chiefly second-rate copies. The exterior was cased with stone, in "wretched taste,"in 1757. The diary of an Elizabethan barrister, named Manningham, preserved in the Harleian Miscellanies, has preserved the interesting fact that in this hall in February, 1602—probably, says Mr. Collier, six months after its first appearance at the Globe—Shakespeare'sTwelfth Nightwas acted.
"Feb. 2, 1601 (2).—At our feast," says Manningham, "we had a play calledTwelve Night, or What you Will, much like theComedy of ErrorsorMenechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian calledInganni. A good practice in it is to make the steward believe his lady widdowe was in love with him, by counterfayting a letter, as from his lady, in generall terms telling him whatshee liked best in him, and prescribing his gestures, inscribing his apparaile, &c., and then, when he came to practise, making him believe they tooke him to be mad."
The Temple revels in the olden time were indeed gorgeous outbursts of mirth and hospitality. One of the most splendid of these took place in the fourth year of Elizabeth's reign, when the queen's favourite, Lord Robert Dudley (afterwards the great Earl of Leicester) was elected Palaphilos, constable or marshal of the inn, to preside over the Christmas festivities. He had lord chancellor and judges, eighty guards, officers of the household, and other distinguished persons to attend him; and another of the queen's subsequent favourites, Christopher Hatton—a handsome youth, remarkable for his skill in dancing—was appointed master of the games. The daily banquets of the Constable were announced by the discharge of a double cannon, and drums and fifes summoned the mock court to the common hall, while sackbuts, cornets, and recorders heralded the arrival of every course. At the first remove a herald at the high table cried,—"The mighty Palaphilos, Prince of Sophie, High Constable, Marshal of the Knights Templars, Patron of the Honourable Order of Pegasus!—a largesse! a largesse!" upon which the Prince of Sophie tossed the man a gold chain worth a thousand talents. The supper ended, the king-at-arms entered, and, doing homage, announced twenty-four special gentlemen, whom Pallas had ordered him to present to Palaphilos as knights-elect of the Order of Pegasus. The twenty-four gentlemen at once appeared, in long white vestures, with scarves of Pallas's colours, and the king-at-arms, bowing to each, explained to them the laws of the new order.
For every feast the steward provided five fat hams, with spices and cakes, and the chief butler seven dozen gilt and silver spoons, twelve damask table-cloths, and twenty candlesticks. The Constable wore gilt armour and a plumed helmet, and bore a poleaxe in his hands. On St. Thomas's Eve a parliament was held, when the two youngest brothers, bearing torches, preceded the procession of benchers, the officers' names were called, and the whole society passed round the hearth singing a carol. On Christmas Eve the minstrels, sounding, preceded the dishes, and, dinner done, sang a song at the high table; after dinner the oldest master of the revels and other gentlemen singing songs.
On Christmas Day the feast grew still more feudal and splendid. At the great meal at noon the minstrels and a long train of servitors bore inthe blanched boar's head, with a golden lemon in its jaws, the trumpeters being preceded by two gentlemen in gowns, bearing four torches of white wax. On St. Stephen's Day the younger Templars waited at table upon the benchers. At the first course the Constable entered, to the sound of horns, preceded by sixteen swaggering trumpeters, while the halberdiers bore "the tower" on their shoulders and marched gravely three times round the fire.
On St. John's Day the Constable was up at seven, and personally called and reprimanded any tardy officers, who were sometimes committed to the Tower for disorder. If any officer absented himself at meals, any one sitting in his place was compelled to pay his fee and assume his office. Any offender, if he escaped into the oratory, could claim sanctuary, and was pardoned if he returned into the hall humbly and as a servitor, carrying a roll on the point of a knife. No one was allowed to sing after the cheese was served.
On Childermas Day, New Year's Day, and Twelfth Night the same costly feasts were continued, only that on Thursday there was roast beef and venison pasty for dinner, and mutton and roast hens were served for supper. The final banquet closing all was preceded by a dance, revel, play, or mask, the gentlemen of every Inn of Court and Chancery being invited, and the hall furnished with side scaffolds for the ladies, who were feasted in the library. The Lord Chancellor and the ancients feasted in the hall, the Templars serving. The feast over, the Constable, in his gilt armour, ambled into the hall on a caparisoned mule, and arranged the sequence of sports.
The Constable then, with three reverences, knelt before the King of the Revels, and, delivering up his naked sword, prayed to be taken into the royal service. Next entered Hatton, the Master of the Game, clad in green velvet, his rangers arrayed in green satin. Blowing "a blast of venery" three times on their horns, and holding green-coloured bows and arrows in their hands, the rangers paced three times round the central fire, then knelt to the King of the Revels, and desired admission into the royal service. Next ensued a strange and barbarous ceremony. A huntsman entered with a live fox and cat and nine or ten couple of hounds, and, to the blast of horns and wild shouting, the poor creatures were torn to shreds, for the amusement of the applauding Templars. At supper the Constable entered to the sound of drums, borne upon a scaffold by four men, and as he was carried three times round the hearth every one shouted, "A lord! a lord!"
He then descended, called together his mock court, by such fantastic names as—
Sir Francis Flatterer, of Fowlershurst, in the countyof Buckingham;Sir Randal Rakabite, of Rascal Hall, in the countyof Rakebell;Sir Morgan Mumchance, of Much Monkery, in thecounty of Mad Mopery;
and the banquet then began, every man having a gilt pot full of wine, and each one paying sixpence for his repast. That night, when the lights were put out, the noisy, laughing train passed out of the portal, and the long revels were ended.
"Sir Edward Coke," says Lord Campbell, writing of this period, "first evinced his forensic powers when deputed by the students to make a representation to the benchers of the Inner Temple respecting the bad quality of theircommonsin the hall. After laboriously studying the facts and the law of the case, he clearly proved that the cook had broken his engagement, and was liable to be dismissed. This, according to the phraseology of the day, was called 'the cook's case,' and he was said to have argued it with so much quickness of penetration and solidity of judgment, that he gave entire satisfaction to the students, and was much admired by the Bench."
In his exquisite "Prothalamion" Spenser alludes to the Temple as if he had sketched it from the river, after a visit to his great patron, the Earl of Essex,—
"Those bricky towers,The which on Thames' broad, aged back doe ride,Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,There whilom wont the Templar Knights to bide,Till they decayed through pride."
Sir John Davis, the author of "Nosce Teipsum," that fine mystic poem on the immortality of the soul, and of that strange philosophical rhapsody on dancing, was expelled the Temple in Elizabeth's reign, for thrashing his friend, another roysterer of the day, Mr. Richard Martin, in the Middle Temple Hall; but afterwards, on proper submission, he was readmitted. Davis afterwards reformed, and became the wise Attorney-General of Ireland. His biographer says, that the preface to his "Irish Reports" vies with Coke for solidity and Blackstone for elegance. Martin (whose monument is now hoarded up in the Triforium) also became a learned lawyer and a friend of Selden's, and was the person to whom Ben Jonson dedicated his bitter play,The Poetaster. In the dedication the poet says, "For whose innocence as for the author's you were once a noble and kindly undertaker: signed, your true lover,Ben Jonson."
On the accession of James I. some of his hungry Scotch courtiers attempted to obtain from the king a grant of the fee-simple of the Temple; upon which the two indignant societies made "humble suit" to the king, and obtained a grant of the property to themselves. The grant was signed in 1609, the benchers paying £10 annually to the king for the Inner Temple, and £10 for the Middle. In gratitude for this concession, the two loyal societies presented his majesty with a stately gold cup, weighing 200½ ounces, which James "most graciously" accepted. On one side was engraved a temple, on the other a flaming altar, with the wordsnil nisi vobis; on the pyramidical cover stood a Roman soldier leaning on his shield. This cup the bibulous monarch ever afterwards esteemed as one of his rarest and richest jewels. In 1623 James issued another of those absurd and trumpery sumptuary edicts, recommending the ancient way of wearing caps, and requesting the Templars to lay aside their unseemly boots and spurs, the badges of "roarers, rakes, and bullies."
The Temple feasts continued to be as lavish and magnificent as in the days of Queen Mary, when no reader was allowed to contribute less than fifteen bucks to the hall dinner, and many during their readings gave fourscore or a hundred.
On the marriage (1613) of the Lady Elizabeth, daughter of King James I., with Prince Frederick, the unfortunate Elector-Palatine, the Temple and Gray's Inn men gave a masque, of which Sir Francis Bacon was the chief contriver. The masque came to Whitehall by water from Winchester Place, in Southwark; three peals of ordnance greeting them as they embarked with torches and lamps, as they passed the Temple Garden, and as they landed. This short trip cost £300. The king, after all, was so tired, and the hall so crowded, that the masque was adjourned till the Saturday following, when all went well. The next night the king gave a supper to the forty masquers; Prince Charles and his courtiers, who had lost a wager to the king at running at the ring, paying for the banquet £30 a man. The masquers, who dined with forty of the chief nobles, kissed his majesty's hand. Shortly after this twenty Templars fought at barriers, in honour of Prince Charles, the benchers contributing thirty shillings each to the expenses; the barristers of seven years' standing, fifteen shillings; and the other gentlemen in commons, ten shillings.
One of the grandest masques ever given by the Templars was one which cost £21,000, and was presented, in 1633, to Charles I. and his French queen. Bulstrode Whitelocke, then in his youth, gives a vividpicture of this pageant, which was meant to refute Prynne's angry "Histro-Mastix." Noy and Selden were members of the committee, and many grave heads met together to discuss the dances, dresses, and music. The music was written by Milton's friend, Lawes, the libretto by Shirley. The procession set out from Ely House, in Holborn, on Candlemas Day, in the evening. The four chariots that bore the sixteen masquers were preceded by twenty footmen in silver-laced scarlet liveries, who carried torches and cleared the way. After these rode 100 gentlemen from the Inns of Court, mounted and richly clad, every gentleman having two lackeys with torches and a page to carry his cloak. Then followed the other masquers—beggars on horseback and boys dressed as birds. The colours of the first chariot were crimson and silver, the four horses being plumed and trapped in parti-coloured tissue. The Middle Temple rode next, in blue and silver; and the Inner Temple and Lincoln's Inn followed in equal bravery, 100 of the suits being reckoned to have cost £10,000. The masque was most perfectly performed in the Banqueting House at Whitehall, the Queen dancing with several of the masquers, and declaring them to be as good dancers as ever she saw.
The year after the Restoration Sir Heneage Finch, afterwards Earl of Nottingham, kept his "reader's feast" in the great hall of the Inner Temple. At that time of universal vice, luxury, and extravagance, the banquet lasted from the 4th to the 17th of August. It was, in fact, open house to all London. The first day came the nobles and privy councillors; the second, the Lord Mayor and aldermen; the third, the whole College of Physicians in their mortuary caps and gowns; the fourth, the doctors and advocates of civil law; on the fifth day, the archbishops, bishops, and obsequious clergy; and on the fifteenth, as a last grand explosion, the King, the Duke of York, the Duke of Buckingham, and half the peers. An entrance was made from the river through the wall of the Temple Garden, the King being received on landing by the Reader and the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas; the path from the garden to the wall was lined with the Reader's servants, clad in scarlet cloaks and white doublets; while above them stood the benchers, barristers, and students, music playing all the while, and twenty violins welcoming Charles into the hall with unanimous scrape and quaver. Dinner was served by fifty young students in their gowns, no meaner servants appearing. In the November following the Duke of York, the Duke of Buckingham, and the Earl of Dorset were admitted members of the Society of the InnerTemple. Six years after, Prince Rupert, then a grizzly old cavalry soldier, and addicted to experiments in chemistry and engraving in his house in the Barbican, received the same honour.
The great fire of 1666, says Mr. Jeaffreson, in his "Law and Lawyers," was stayed in its westward course at the Temple; but it was not suppressed until the flames had consumed many sets of chambers, had devoured the title-deeds of a vast number of valuable estates, and had almost licked the windows of the Temple Church. Clarendon has recorded that on the occasion of this stupendous calamity, which occurred when a large proportion of the Templars were out of town, the lawyers in residence declined to break open the chambers and rescue the property of absent members of their society, through fear of prosecution for burglary. Another great fire, some years later (January, 1678-79), destroyed the old cloisters and part of the old hall of the Inner Temple, and the greater part of the residential buildings of the "Old Temple." Breaking out at midnight, and lasting till noon of next day, it devoured, in the Middle Temple, the whole of Pump Court (in which locality it originated), Elm-tree Court, Vine Court, and part of Brick Court; in the Inner Temple the cloisters, the greater part of Hare Court, and part of the hall. The night was bitterly cold, and the Templars, aroused from their beds to preserve life and property, could not get an adequate supply of water from the Thames, which the unusual severity of the season had frozen. In this difficulty they actually brought barrels of ale from the Temple butteries, and fed the engines with the malt liquor. Of course this supply of fluid was soon exhausted, so the fire spreading eastward, the lawyers fought it by blowing up the buildings that were in immediate danger. Gunpowder was more effectual than beer; but the explosions were sadly destructive to human life. Amongst the buildings thus demolished was the library of the Inner Temple. Naturally, but with no apparent good reason, the sufferers by the fire attributed it to treachery on the part of persons unknown, just as the citizens attributed the fire of 1666 to the Papists. It is more probable that the calamity was caused by some such accident as that which occasioned the fire which, during John Campbell's attorney-generalship, destroyed a large amount of valuable property, and had its origin in the clumsiness of a barrister who upset upon his fire a vessel full of spirit. Of this fire Lord Campbell observes:—"When I was Attorney-General, my chambers in Paper Buildings, Temple, were burnt to the ground in the night-time, and all my books and manuscripts,with some valuable official papers, were consumed. Above all, I had to lament a collection of letters written to me by my dear father, from the time of my going to college till his death in 1824. All lamented this calamity except the claimant of a peerage, some of whose documents (suspected to be forged) he hoped were destroyed; but fortunately they had been removed into safe custody a few days before, and the claim was dropped." The fire here alluded to broke out in the chambers of one Thornbury, in Pump Court.
THE OLD HALL OF THE INNER TEMPLE
"I remember," says North in his "Life of Lord Keeper Guildford," "that after the fire of the Temple it was considered whether the old cloister walks should be rebuilt or rather improved intochambers, which latter had been for the benefit of the Middle Temple; but, in regard that it could not be done without the consent of the Inner Houses, the masters of the Middle Houses waited upon the then Mr. Attorney Finch to desire the concurrence of his society upon a proposition of some benefit to be thrown in on his side. But Mr. Attorney would by no means give way to it, and reproved the Middle Templars very bitterly and eloquently upon the subject of students walking in evenings there, and putting 'cases,' which, he said, 'was done in his time, mean and low as the buildings were then. However, it comes,' he said, 'that such a benefit to students is now made littleaccount of.' And thereupon the cloisters, by the order and disposition of Sir Christopher Wren, were built as they now stand."
Door from the Middle Temple. Wig-Shop in the Middle Temple. Door from the Inner Temple.Screen of the Middle Temple Hall.Fireplace in the Inner Temple. Buttery of the Inner Temple.
The last revel in any of the Inns of Court was held in the Inner Temple, February, 1733 (George II.), in honour of Mr. Talbot, a bencher of that house, accepting the Great Seal. The ceremony is described by an eye-witness in "Wynne's Eunomus." The Lord Chancellor arrived at two o'clock, preceded by Mr. Wollaston, Master of the Revels, and followed by Dr. Sherlock, Bishop of Bangor, Master of the Temple, and the judges and serjeants formerly of the Inner Temple. There was an elegant dinner provided for them and the chancellor's officers, but the barristers and students had only the usual meal of grand days, except that each man was furnished with a flask of claret besides the usual allowance of port and sack. Fourteen students waited on the Bench table: among them was Mr. Talbot, the Lord Chancellor's eldest son, and by their means any special dish was easily obtainable from the upper table. A large gallery was built over the screen for the ladies; and music, placed in the little gallery at the upper end of the hall, played all dinner-time. As soon as dinner was over, the play ofLove for Loveand the farce ofThe Devil to Paywere acted, the actors coming from the Haymarket in chaises, all ready-dressed. It was said they refused all gratuity, being satisfied with the honour of performing before such an audience. After the play, the Lord Chancellor, the Master of the Temple, the judges and benchers retired into their parliament chamber, and in about half an hour afterwards came into the hall again, and a large ring was formed round the fire-place (but no fire nor embers were in it). Then the Master of the Revels, who went first, took the Lord Chancellor by the right hand, and he with his left took Mr. J[ustice] Page, who, joined to the other judges, serjeants, and benchers present, danced, or rather walked, round about the coal fire, according to the old ceremony, three times, during which they were aided in the figure of the dance by Mr. George Cooke, the prothonotary, then upwards of sixty; and all the time of the dance theancient song, accompanied with music, was sung by one Tony Aston (an actor), dressed in a bar gown, whose father had been formerly Master of the Plea Office in the King's Bench. When this was over, the ladies came down from the gallery, went into the parliament chamber, and stayed about a quarter of an hour, while the hall was putting in order. Then they went into the hall and danced a few minutes. Country dances began about ten, and at twelve a very fine collation was provided for the whole company, from which theyreturned to dancing. The Prince of Wales honoured the performance with his company part of the time. He came into the music gallery wing about the middle of the play, and went away as soon as the farce of walking round the coal fire was over.
Mr. Peter Cunningham,aproposof these revels, mentions that when the floor of the Middle Temple Hall was taken up in 1764 there were found nearly one hundred pair of very small dice, yellowed by time, which had dropped through the chinks above. The same writer caps this fact by one of his usually apposite quotations. Wycherly, in hisPlain Dealer(1676—Charles II.), makes Freeman, one of his characters, say:—"Methinks 'tis like one of the Halls in Christmas time, whither from all parts fools bring their money to try the dice (nor the worst judges), whether it shall be their own or no."
The Inner Temple Hall (the refectory of the ancient knights) was almost entirely rebuilt in 1816. The roof was overloaded with timber, the west wall was cracking, and the wooden cupola of the bell let in the rain. The pointed arches and rude sculpture at the entrance doors showed great antiquity, but the northern wall had been rebuilt in 1680. The incongruous Doric screen was surmounted by lions' heads, cones, and other anomalous devices, and in 1741 low, classic windows had been inserted in the south front. Of the old hall, where the Templars frequently held their chapters, and at different times entertained King John, King Henry III., and several of the legates, several portions still remain. A very ancient groined Gothic arch forms the roof of the present buttery, and in the apartment beyond there is a fine groined and vaulted ceiling. In the cellars below are old walls of vast thickness, part of an ancient window, a curious fire-place, and some pointed arches, all now choked with modern brick partitions and dusty staircases. These vaults formerly communicated by a cloister with the chapel of St. Anne, on the south side of the church. In the reign of James I. some brick chambers, three storeys high, were erected over the cloister, but were burnt down in 1678. In 1681 the cloister chambers were again rebuilt.
During the formation of the present new entrance to the Temple by the church at the bottom of Inner Temple Lane, when some old houses were removed, the masons came on a strong ancient wall of chalk and ragstone, supposed to have been the ancient northern boundary of the convent.
Let us cull a few Temple anecdotes from various ages:—
In November, 1819, Erskine, in the House of Lords, speaking upon Lord Lansdowne's motion foran inquiry into the state of the country, condemned the conduct of the yeomanry at the "Manchester massacre." "By an ordinary display of spirit and resolution," observed the brilliant egotist to his brother peers (who were so impressed by his complacent volubility and good-humoured self-esteem, that they were for the moment ready to take him at his own valuation), "insurrection may be repressed without violating the law or the constitution. In the riots of 1780, when the mob were preparing to attack the house of Lord Mansfield, I offered to defend it with a small military force; but this offer was unluckily rejected. Afterwards, being in the Temple when the rioters were preparing to force the gate and had fired several times, I went to the gate, opened it, and showed them a field-piece, which I was prepared to discharge in case the attack was persisted in. They were daunted, fell back, and dispersed."
Judge Burrough (says Mr. Jeaffreson, in his "Law and Lawyers") used to relate that when the Gordon Rioters besieged the Temple he and a strong body of barristers, headed by a sergeant of the Guards, were stationed in Inner Temple Lane, and that, having complete confidence in the strength of their massive gate, they spoke bravely of their desire to be fighting on the other side. At length the gate was forced. The lawyers fell into confusion and were about to beat a retreat, when the sergeant, a man of infinite humour, cried out in a magnificent voice, "Take care no gentleman fires from behind." The words struck awe into the assailants and caused the barristers to laugh. The mob, who had expected neither laughter nor armed resistance, took to flight, telling all whom they met that the bloody-minded lawyers were armed to the teeth and enjoying themselves. The Temple was saved. When these Gordon Rioters filled London with alarm, no member of the junior bar was more prosperous and popular than handsome Jack Scott, and as he walked from his house in Carey Street to the Temple, with his wife on his arm, he returned the greetings of the barristers, who, besides liking him for a good fellow, thought it prudent to be on good terms with a man sure to achieve eminence. Dilatory in his early as well as his later years, Scott left his house that morning half an hour late. Already it was known to the mob that the Templars were assembling in their college, and a cry of "The Temple! kill the lawyers!" had been raised in Whitefriars and Essex Street. Before they reached the Middle Temple gate Mr. and Mrs. Scott were assaulted more than once. The man who won Bessie Surtees from a host of rivals and carried her away against the will of her parents and the wishesof his own father, was able to protect her from serious violence. But before the beautiful creature was safe within the Temple her dress was torn, and when at length she stood in the centre of a crowd of excited and admiring barristers, her head was bare and her ringlets fell loose upon her shoulders. "The scoundrels have got your hat, Bessie," whispered John Scott; "but never mind—they have left you your hair."
In Lord Eldon's "Anecdote Book" there is another gate story amongst the notes on the Gordon Riots. "We youngsters," says the aged lawyer, "at the Temple determined that we would not remain inactive during such times; so we introduced ourselves into a troop to assist the military. We armed ourselves as well as we could, and next morning we drew up in the court ready to follow out a troop of soldiers who were on guard. When, however, the soldiers had passed through the gate it was suddenly shut in our faces, and the officer in command shouted from the other side, 'Gentlemen, I am much obliged to you for your intended assistance; but I do not choose to allow my soldiers to be shot, so I have ordered you to be locked in.'" And away he galloped.
The elder Colman decided on making the younger one a barrister; and after visits to Scotland and Switzerland, the son returned to Soho Square, and found that his father had taken for him chambers in the Temple, and entered him as a student at Lincoln's Inn, where he afterwards kept a few terms by eating oysters. Upon this Mr. Peake notes:—"The students of Lincoln's Inn keep term by dining, or pretending to dine, in the hall during the term time. Those who feed there are accommodated with wooden trenchers instead of plates, and previously to the dinner oysters are served up by way of prologue to the play. Eating the oysters, or going into the hall without eating them, if you please, and then departing to dine elsewhere, is quite sufficient for term-keeping." The chambers in King's Bench Walk were furnished with a tent-bedstead, two tables, half-a-dozen chairs, and a carpet as much too scanty for the boards as Sheridan's "rivulet of rhyme" for its "meadow of margin." To these the elder Colman added £10 worth of law books which had been given to him in his own Lincoln's Inn days by Lord Bath; then enjoining the son to work hard, the father left town upon a party of pleasure.
Colman had sent his son to Switzerland to get him away from a certain Miss Catherine Morris, an actress of the Haymarket company. This answered for a time, but no sooner had the father left the son in the Temple than he set off with Miss Morristo Gretna Green, and was there married, in 1784; and four years after, the father's sanction having been duly obtained, they were publicly married at Chelsea Church.
In the same staircase with Colman, in the Temple, lived the witty Jekyll, who, seeing in Colman's chambers a round cage with a squirrel in it, looked for a minute or two at the little animal, which was performing the same operation as a man in the treadmill, and then quietly said, "Ah, poor devil! he is going the Home Circuit;" the locality where it was uttered—the Temple—favouring this technical joke.
On the morning young Colman began his studies (December 20, 1784) he was interrupted by the intelligence that the funeral procession of the great Dr. Johnson was on its way from his late residence, Bolt Court, through Fleet Street, to Westminster Abbey. Colman at once threw down his pen, and ran forth to see the procession, but was disappointed to find it much less splendid and imposing than the sepulchral pomp of Garrick five years before.
Dr. Dibdin thus describes the Garden walks of the last century:—"Towards evening it was the fashion for the leading counsel to promenade during the summer months in the Temple Gardens. Cocked hats and ruffles, with satin small-clothes and silk stockings, at this time constituted the usual evening dress. Lord Erskine, though a great deal shorter than his brethren, somehow always seemed to take the lead, both in place and in discourse, and shouts of laughter would frequently follow his dicta."
Ugly Dunning, afterwards the famous Lord Ashburton, entered the Middle Temple in 1752, and was called four years later, in 1756. Lord Chancellor Thurlow used to describe him wittily as "the knave of clubs."
Home Tooke, Dunning, and Kenyon were accustomed to dine together, during the vacation, at a little eating-house in the neighbourhood of Chancery Lane for the sum of sevenpence-halfpenny each. "As to Dunning and myself," said Tooke, "we were generous, for we gave the girl who waited upon us a penny a piece; but Kenyon, who always knew the value of money, sometimes rewarded her with a halfpenny, and sometimes with a promise."
Blackstone, before dedicating his powers finally to the study of the law in which he afterwards became so famous, wrote in Temple chambers his "Farewell to the Muse:"—