Old and New London Part 2

Fairholt, one of the best of our antiquarian draughtsmen. The later Roman London was in general outline the same in shape and size as the London of the Saxons and Normans. The newer walls Pennant calculates at 3 miles 165 feet in circ.u.mference, they were 22 feet high, and guarded with forty lofty towers. At the end of the last century large portions of the old Roman wall were traceable in many places, but time has devoured almost the last morsels of that great _piece de resistance_. In 1763 Mr. Gough made a drawing of a square Roman tower (one of three) then standing in Houndsditch. It was built in alternate layers of ma.s.sive square stones and red tiles. The old loophole for the sentinel had been enlarged into a square latticed window. In 1857, while digging foundations for houses on the north-east side of Aldermanbury Postern, the workmen came on a portion of the Roman wall strengthened by blind arches. All that now substantially remains of the old fortification is a bastion in St. Giles's Church, Cripplegate; a fragment in St. Martin's Court, off Ludgate Hill; another portion exists in the Old Bailey, concealed behind houses; and a fourth, near George Street, Tower Hill.

Portions of the wall have, however, been also broached in Falcon Square (one of which we have engraved), Bush Lane, Scott's Yard, and Cornhill, and others built in cellars and warehouses from opposite the Tower and Cripplegate.

The line of the Roman walls ran from the Tower straight to Aldgate; there making an angle, it continued to Bishopsgate. From there it turned eastward to St. Giles's Churchyard, where it veered south to Falcon Square. At this point it continued west to Aldersgate, running under Christ's Hospital, and onward to Giltspur Street. There forming an angle, it proceeded directly to Ludgate towards the Thames, pa.s.sing to the south of St. Andrew's Church. The wall then crossed Addle Street, and took a course along Upper and Lower Thames Street towards the Tower.

In Thames Street the wall has been found built on oaken piles; on these was laid a stratum of chalk and stones, and over this a course of large, hewn sandstones, cemented with quicklime, sand, and pounded tile. The body of the wall was constructed of ragstone, flint, and lime, bonded at intervals with courses of plain and curve-edged tiles.

That Roman London grew slowly there is abundant proof. In building the new Exchange, the workmen came on a gravel-pit full of oyster-sh.e.l.ls, cattle bones, old sandals, and shattered pottery. No coin found there being later than Severus indicates that this ground was bare waste outside the original city until at least the latter part of the third century. How far Roman London eventually spread its advancing waves of houses may be seen from the fact that Roman wall-paintings, indicating villas of men of wealth and position, have been found on both sides of High Street, Southwark, almost up to St. George's Church; while one of the outlying Roman cemeteries bordered the Kent Road.

From the horns of cattle having been dug up in St. Paul's Churchyard, the monks, ever eager to discover traces of that Paganism with which they amalgamated Christianity, conjectured that a temple of Diana once stood on the site of St. Paul's. A stone altar, with a rude figure of the amazon G.o.ddess sculptured upon it, was indeed discovered in making the foundations for Goldsmiths' Hall, Cheapside; but this was a mere votive or private altar, and proves nothing; and the ox bones, if any, found at St. Paul's, were merely refuse thrown into a rubbish-heap outside the old walls. As to the Temple of Apollo, supposed to have been replaced by Westminster Abbey, that is merely an invention of rival monks to glorify Thorney Island, and to render its antiquity equal to the fabulous claims of St. Paul's. Nor is there any positive proof that shrines to British G.o.ds ever stood on either place, though that they may have done so is not at all improbable.

The existing relics of Roman London are far more valuable and more numerous than is generally supposed. Innumerable tesselated pavements, masterpieces of artistic industry and taste, have been found in the City. A few of these should be noted. In 1854 part of the pavement of a room, twenty-eight feet square, was discovered, when the Excise Office was pulled down, between Bishopsgate Street and Broad Street. The central subject was supposed to be the Rape of Europa. A few years before another pavement was met with near the same spot. In 1841 two pavements were dug up under the French Protestant Church in Threadneedle Street. The best of these we have engraved. In 1792 a circular pavement was found in the same locality; and there has also been dug up in the same street a curious female head, the size of life, formed of coloured stones and gla.s.s. In 1805 a beautiful Roman pavement was disinterred on the south-west angle of the Bank of England, near the gate opening into Lothbury, and is now in the British Museum. In 1803 a fine specimen of pavement was found in front of the East-India House, Leadenhall Street, the central design being Bacchus reclining on a panther. In this pavement twenty distinct tints had been successfully used. Other pavements have been cut through in Crosby Square, Bartholemew Lane, Fenchurch Street, and College Street. The soil, according to Mr. Roach Smith, seems to have risen over them at the rate of nearly a foot a century.

The statuary found in London should also not be forgotten. One of the most remarkable pieces was a colossal bronze head of the Emperor Hadrian, dredged up from the Thames a little below London Bridge. It is now in the British Museum. A colossal bronze hand, thirteen inches long, was also found in Thames Street, near the Tower. In 1857, near London Bridge, the dredgers found a beautiful bronze Apollino, a Mercury of exquisite design, a priest of Cybele, and a figure supposed to be Jupiter. The Apollino and Mercury are masterpieces of ideal beauty and grace. In 1842 a _chef d'oeuvre_ was dug out near the old Roman wall in Queen Street, Cheapside. It was the bronze stooping figure of an archer.

It has silver eyes; and the perfect expression and anatomy display the highest art.

In 1825 a graceful little silver figure of the child Harpocrates, the G.o.d of Silence, looped with a gold chain, was found in the Thames, and is now in the British Museum. In 1839 a pair of gold armlets were dug up in Queen Street, Cheapside. In a kiln in St. Paul's Churchyard, in 1677, there were found lamps, bottles, urns, and dishes. Among other relics of Roman London drifted down by time we may instance articles of red glazed pottery, tiles, gla.s.s cups, window gla.s.s, bath sc.r.a.pers, gold hairpins, enamelled clasps, sandals, writing tablets, bronze spoons, forks, distaffs, bells, dice, and millstones. As for coins, which the Romans seem to have hid in every conceivable nook, Mr. Roach Smith says that within twenty years upwards of 2,000 were, to his own knowledge, found in London, chiefly in the bed of the Thames. Only one Greek coin, as far as we know, has ever been met with in London excavations.

The Romans left deep footprints wherever they trod. Many of our London streets still follow the lines they first laid down. The river bank still heaves beneath the ruins of their palaces. London Stone, as we have already shown, still stands to mark the starting-point of the great roads that they designed. In a lane out of the Strand there still exists a bath where their sinewy youth laved their limbs, dusty from the chariot races at the Campus Martius at Finsbury. The pavements trodden by the feet of Hadrian and Constantine still lie buried under the restless wheels that roll over our City streets. The ramparts the legionaries guarded have not yet quite crumbled to dust, though the rude people they conquered have themselves long since grown into conquerors.

Roman London now exists only in fragments, invisible save to the prying antiquary. As the seed is to be found hanging to the root of the ripe wheat, so some filaments of the first germ of London, of the British hut and the Roman villa, still exist hidden under the foundations of the busy city that now teems with thousands of inhabitants. We tread under foot daily the pride of our old oppressors.

CHAPTER II.

TEMPLE BAR.

Temple Bar--The Golgotha of English Traitors--When Temple Bar was made of Wood--Historical Pageants at Temple Bar--The a.s.sociations of Temple Bar--Mischievous Processions through Temple Bar--The First grim Trophy--Rye-House Plot Conspirators.

Temple Bar was rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren, in 1670-72, soon after the Great Fire had swept away eighty-nine London churches, four out of the seven City gates, 460 streets, and 13,200 houses, and had destroyed fifteen of the twenty-six wards, and laid waste 436 acres of buildings, from the Tower eastward to the Inner Temple westward.

The old black gateway, once the dreaded Golgotha of English traitors, separates, it should be remembered, the Strand from Fleet Street, the city from the shire, and the Freedom of the City of London from the Liberty of the City of Westminster. As Hatton (1708--Queen Anne) says,--"This gate opens not immediately into the City itself, but into the Liberty or Freedom thereof." We need hardly say that nothing can be more erroneous than the ordinary London supposition that Temple Bar ever formed part of the City fortifications. Mr. Gilbert a Beckett, laughing at this tradition, once said in _Punch_: "Temple Bar has always seemed to me a weak point in the fortifications of London. Bless you, the besieging army would never stay to bombard it--they would dash through the barber's."

The Great Fire never reached nearer Temple Bar than the Inner Temple, on the south side of Fleet Street, and St. Dunstan's Church, on the north.

The Bar is of Portland stone, which London smoke alternately blackens and calcines; and each facade has four Corinthian pilasters, an entablature, and an arched pediment. On the west (Strand) side, in two niches, stand, as eternal sentries, Charles I. and Charles II., in Roman costume. Charles I. has long ago lost his baton, as he once deliberately lost his head. Over the keystone of the central arch there used to be the royal arms. On the east side are James I. and Elizabeth (by many able writers supposed to be Anne of Denmark, James I.'s queen). She is pointing her white finger at Child's; while he, looking down on the pa.s.sing cabs, seems to say, "I am nearly tired of standing; suppose we go to Whitehall, and sit down a bit?"

The slab over the eastern side of the arch bears the following inscription, now all but smoothed down by time:--

"Erected in the year 1670, Sir Samuel Starling, Mayor; continued in the year 1671, Sir Richard Ford, Lord Mayor; and finished in the year, 1672, Sir George Waterman, Lord Mayor."

All these persons were friends of Pepys.

The upper part of the Bar is flanked by scrolls, but the fruit and flowers once sculptured on the pediment, and the supporters of the royal arms over the posterns, have crumbled away. In the centre of each facade is a semicircular-headed, ecclesiastical-looking window, that casts a dim h.o.r.n.y light into a room above the gate, held of the City, at an annual rent of some 50, by Messrs. Childs, the bankers, as a sort of muniment-room for their old account-books. There is here preserved, among other costlier treasures of Mammon, the private account-book of Charles II. The original Child was a friend of Pepys, and is mentioned by him as quarrelling with the Duke of York on Admiralty matters. The Child who succeeded him was a friend of Pope, and all but led him into the South-Sea Bubble speculation.

Those affected, mean statues, with the crinkly drapery, were the work of a vain, half-crazed sculptor named John Bushnell, who died mad in 1701.

Bushnell, who had visited Rome and Venice, executed Cowley's monument in Westminster Abbey, and the statues of Charles I., Charles II., and Gresham, in the Old Exchange.

There is no extant historical account of Temple Bar in which the following pa.s.sage from Strype (George I.) is not to be found embedded like a fossil; it is, in fact, nearly all we London topographers know of the early history of the Bar:--"Anciently," says Strype, "there were only posts, rails, and a chain, such as are now in Holborn, Smithfield, and Whitechapel bars. Afterwards there was a house of timber erected across the street, with a narrow gateway and an entry on the south side of it under the house." This structure is to be seen in the bird's-eye view of London, 1601 (Elizabeth), and in Hollar's seven-sheet map of London (Charles II.)

The date of the erection of the "wooden house" is not to be ascertained; but there is the house plain enough in a view of London to which Maitland affixes the date about 1560 (the second year of Elizabeth), so we may perhaps safely put it down as early as Edward VI. or Henry VIII.

Indeed, if a certain sc.r.a.p of history is correct--_i.e._, that bluff King Hal once threatened, if a certain Bill did not pa.s.s the Commons a little quicker, to fix the heads of several refractory M.P.s on the top of Temple Bar--we must suppose the old City toll-gate to be as old as the early Tudors.

After Simon de Montfort's death, at the battle of Evesham, 1265, Prince Edward, afterwards Edward I., punished the rebellious Londoners, who had befriended Montfort, by taking away all their street chains and bars, and locking them up in the Tower.

The earliest known doc.u.mentary and historical notice of Temple Bar is in 1327, the first year of Edward III.; and in the thirty-fourth year of the same reign we find, at an inquisition before the mayor, twelve witnesses deposing that the commonalty of the City had, time out of mind, had free ingress and egress from the City to Thames and from Thames to the City, through the great gate of the Templars situate within Temple Bar. This referred to some dispute about the right of way through the Temple, built in the reign of Henry I. In 1384 Richard II.

granted a licence for paving Strand Street from Temple Bar to the Savoy, and collecting tolls to cover such charges.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PROCLAMATION OF CHARLES II. AT TEMPLE BAR (_see page 26_).]

The historical pageants that have taken place at Temple Bar deserve a notice, however short. On the 5th of November, 1422, the corpse of that brave and chivalrous king, the hero of Agincourt, Henry V., was borne to its rest at Westminster Abbey by the chief citizens and n.o.bles, and every doorway from Southwark to Temple Bar had its mournful torch-bearer. In 1502-3 the hea.r.s.e of Elizabeth of York, queen of Henry VII., halted at Temple Bar, on its way from the Tower to Westminster, and at the Bar the Abbots of Westminster and Bermondsey blessed the corpse, and the Earl of Derby and a large company of n.o.bles joined the sable funeral throng. After sorrow came joy, and after joy sorrow--_Ita vita_. In the next reign poor Anne Boleyn, radiant with happiness and triumph, came through the Bar (May 31, 1534), on her way to the Tower, to be welcomed by the clamorous citizens, the day before her ill-starred coronation. Temple Bar on that occasion was new painted and repaired, and near it stood singing men and children--the Fleet Street conduit all the time running claret. The old gate figures more conspicuously the day before the coronation of that wondrous child, Edward VI. Two hogsheads of wine were then ladled out to the thirsty mob, and the gate at Temple Bar was painted with battlements and b.u.t.tresses, richly hung with cloth of Arras, and all in a flutter with "fourteen standard flags." There were eight French trumpeters blowing their best, besides "a pair of regals," with children singing to the same. In September, 1553, when Edward's cold-hearted half-sister, Mary Tudor, came through the City, according to ancient English custom, the day before her coronation, she did not ride on horseback, as Edward had done, but sat in a chariot covered with cloth of tissue and drawn by six horses draped with the same. Minstrels piped and trumpeted at Ludgate, and Temple Bar was newly painted and hung.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PENANCE OF THE d.u.c.h.eSS OF GLOUCESTER (_see page 32_).]

Old Temple Bar, the background to many historical scenes, figures in the rash rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt. When he had fought his way down Piccadilly to the Strand, Temple Bar was thrown open to him, or forced open by him; but when he had been repulsed at Ludgate he was hemmed in by cavalry at Temple Bar, where he surrendered. This foolish revolt led to the death of innocent Lady Jane Grey, and brought sixty brave gentlemen to the scaffold and the gallows.

On Elizabeth's procession from the Tower before her coronation, January, 1559, Gogmagog the Albion, and Corineus the Briton, the two Guildhall giants, stood on the Bar; and on the south side there were chorister lads, one of whom, richly attired as a page, bade the queen farewell in the name of the whole City. In 1588, the glorious year that the Armada was defeated, Elizabeth pa.s.sed through the Bar on her way to return thanks to G.o.d solemnly at St. Paul's. The City waits stood in triumph on the roof of the gate. The Lord Mayor and Aldermen, in scarlet gowns, welcomed the queen and delivered up the City sword, then on her return they took horse and rode before her. The City Companies lined the north side of the street, the lawyers and gentlemen of the Inns of Court the south. Among the latter stood a person afterwards not altogether unknown, one Francis Bacon, who displayed his wit by saying to a friend, "Mark the courtiers! Those who bow first to the citizens are in debt; those who bow first to us are at law!"

In 1601, when the Earl of Ess.e.x made his insane attempt to rouse the City to rebellion, Temple Bar, we are told, was thrown open to him; but Ludgate being closed against him on his retreat from Cheapside, he came back by boat to Ess.e.x House, where he surrendered after a short and useless resistance.

King James made his first public entry into his royal City of London, with his consort and son Henry, upon the 15th of March, 1603-4. The king was mounted upon a white genet, ambling through the crowded streets under a canopy held by eight gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, as representatives of the Barons of the Cinque Ports, and pa.s.sed under six arches of triumph, to take his leave at the Temple of Ja.n.u.s, erected for the occasion at Temple Bar. This edifice was fifty-seven feet high, proportioned in every respect like a temple.

In June, 1649 (the year of the execution of Charles), Cromwell and the Parliament dined at Guildhall in state, and the mayor, says Whitelocke, delivered up the sword to the Speaker, at Temple Bar, as he had before done to King Charles.

Philips, Milton's nephew, who wrote the continuation of Baker's Chronicle, describes the ceremony at Temple Bar on the proclamation of Charles II. The old oak gates being shut, the king-at-arms, with tabard on and trumpet before him, knocked and gravely demanded entrance. The Lord Mayor appointed some one to ask who knocked. The king-at-arms replied, that if they would open the wicket, and let the Lord Mayor come thither, he would to him deliver his message. The Lord Mayor then appeared, tremendous in crimson velvet gown, and on horseback, of all things in the world, the trumpets sounding as the gallant knight p.r.i.c.ked forth to demand of the herald, who he was and what was his message. The bold herald, with his hat on, answered, regardless of Lindley Murray, who was yet unknown, "We are the herald-at-arms appointed and commanded by the Lords and Commons a.s.sembled in Parliament, and demand an entrance into the famous City of London, to proclaim Charles II. King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, and we expect your speedy answer to our demand." An alderman then replied, "The message is accepted," and the gates were thrown open.

When William III. came to see the City and the Lord Mayor's Show in 1689, the City militia, holding lighted flambeaux, lined Fleet Street as far as Temple Bar.

The shadow of every monarch and popular hero since Charles II.'s time has rested for at least a pa.s.sing moment at the old gateway. Queen Anne pa.s.sed here to return thanks at St. Paul's for the victory of Blenheim.

Here Marlborough's coach ominously broke down in 1714, when he returned in triumph from his voluntary exile.

George III. pa.s.sed through Temple Bar, young and happy, the year after his coronation, and again when, old and almost broken-hearted, he returned thanks for his partial recovery from insanity; and in our time that graceless son of his, the Prince Regent, came through the Bar in 1814, to thank G.o.d at St. Paul's for the downfall of Bonaparte.

On the 9th November, 1837, the accession of Queen Victoria, Alderman Kelly, picturesque in scarlet gown, Spanish hat, and black feathers, presented the City sword to the Queen at Temple Bar; Alderman Cowan was ready with the same weapon in 1844, when the Queen opened the new Royal Exchange; but in 1851, when her Majesty once more visited the City, the old ceremony was (wrongly, we think) dispensed with.

At the funeral of Lord Nelson, the honoured corpse, followed by downcast old sailors, was met at the Bar by the Lord Mayor and the Corporation; and the Great Duke's funeral car, and the long train of representative soldiers, rested at the Bar, which was hung with black velvet.

A few earlier a.s.sociations connected with the present Bar deserve a moment or two's recollection. On February 12th, when General Monk--"Honest George," as his old Cromwellian soldiers used to call him--entered London, dislodged the "Rump" Parliament, and prepared for the Restoration of Charles II., bonfires were lit, the City bells rung, and London broke into a sudden flame of joy. Pepys, walking homeward about ten o'clock, says:--"The common joy was everywhere to be seen. The number of bonfires--there being fourteen between St. Dunstan's and Temple Bar, and at Strand Bridge, east of Catherine Street, I could at one time tell thirty-one fires."

On November 17, 1679, the year after the sham Popish Plot concocted by those matchless scoundrels, t.i.tus Oates, an expelled naval chaplain, and Bedloe, a swindler and thief, Temple Bar was made the spot for a great mob pilgrimage, on the anniversary of the accession of Queen Elizabeth.

The ceremonial is supposed to have been organised by that restless plotter against a Popish succession, Lord Shaftesbury, and the gentlemen of the Green Ribbon Club, whose tavern, the "King's Head," was at the corner of Chancery Lane, opposite the Inner Temple gate. To scare and vex the Papists, the church bells began to clash out as early as three o'clock on the morning of that dangerous day. At dusk the procession of several thousand half-crazed torch-bearers started from Moorgate, along Bishopsgate Street, and down Houndsditch and Aldgate (pa.s.sing Shaftesbury's house imagine the roar of the monster mob, the wave of torches, and the fiery fountains of squibs at that point!), then through Leadenhall Street and Cornhill, by the Royal Exchange, along Cheapside and on to Temple Bar, where the bonfire awaited the puppets. In a torrent of fire the noisy Protestants pa.s.sed through the exulting City, making the Papists cower and shudder in their garrets and cellars, and before the flaming deluge opened a storm of shouting people. This procession consisted of fifteen groups of priests, Jesuits, and friars, two following a man on a horse, holding up before him a dummy, dressed to represent Sir Edmondbury G.o.dfrey, a Protestant justice and wood merchant, supposed to have been murdered by Roman Catholics at Somerset House. It was attended by a body-guard of 150 swordbearers and a man roaring a political cry of the time through a brazen speaking-trumpet.

The great bonfire was built up mountain high opposite the Inner Temple gate. Some zealous Protestants, by pre-arrangement, had crowned the prim and meagre statue of Elizabeth (still on the east side of the Bar) with a wreath of gilt laurel, and placed under her hand (that now points to Child's Bank) a golden glistening shield, with the motto, "The Protestant Religion and Magna Charta," inscribed upon it. Several lighted torches were stuck before her niche. Lastly, amidst a fiery shower of squibs from every door and window, the Pope and his companions were toppled into the huge bonfire, with shouts that reached almost to Charing Cross.

These mischievous processions were continued till the reign of George I.

There was to have been a magnificent one on November 17, 1711, when the Whigs were dreading the contemplated peace with the French and the return of Marlborough. But the Tories, declaring that the Kit-Kat Club was urging the mob to destroy the house of Harley, the Minister, and to tear him to pieces, seized on the wax figures in Drury Lane, and forbade the ceremony.

As early as two years after the Restoration, Sir Balthazar Gerbier, a restless architectural quack and adventurer of those days, wrote a pamphlet proposing a sumptuous gate at Temple Bar, and the levelling of the Fleet Valley. After the Great Fire Charles II. himself hurried the erection of the Bar, and promised money to carry out the work. During the Great Fire, Temple Bar was one of the stations for constables, 100 firemen, and 30 soldiers.

The Rye-House Plot brought the first trophy to the Golgotha of the Bar, in 1684, twelve years after its erection. Sir Thomas Armstrong was deep in the scheme. If the discreditable witnesses examined against Lord William Russell are to be believed, a plot had been concocted by a few desperate men to a.s.sa.s.sinate "the Blackbird and the Goldfinch"--as the conspirators called the King and the Duke of York--as they were in their coach on their way from Newmarket to London. This plan seems to have been the suggestion of Rumbold, a maltster, who lived in a lonely moated farmhouse, called Rye House, about eighteen miles from London, near the river Ware, close to a by-road that leads from Bishop Stortford to Hoddesdon. Charles II. had a violent hatred to Armstrong, who had been his Gentleman of the Horse, and was supposed to have incited his illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, to rebellion. Sir Thomas was hanged at Tyburn. After the body had hung half an hour, the hangman cut it down, stripped it, lopped off the head, threw the heart into a fire, and divided the body into four parts. The fore-quarter (after being boiled in pitch at Newgate) was set on Temple Bar, the head was placed on Westminster Hall, and the rest of the body was sent to Stafford, which town Sir Thomas represented in Parliament.