A Book About Lawyers. John Cordy Jeaffreson
Queen's Drawing-room, "when are you going into your new house?" "Madam," answered the surly Chancellor, incensed by her curiosity, "the Queen has asked me that impudent question, and I would not answer her; I will not tell you." For years Loughborough and Erskine had houses in Hampstead. "In Lord Mansfield's time," Erskine once said to Lord Campbell, "although the King's Bench monopolized all the common-law business, the court often rose at one or two o'clock—the papers, special, crown, and peremptory, being cleared; and then I refreshed myself by a drive to my villa at Hampstead." It was on Hampstead Heath that Loughborough, meeting Erskine in the dusk, said, "Erskine, you must not take Paine's brief;" and received the prompt reply, "But I have been retained, and I will take it, by G-d!" Much of that which is most pleasant in Erskine's career occurred at his Hampstead villa. Of Lord Kenyon's weekly trips from his mansion in Lincoln's Inn Fields to his farm-house at Richmond notice has been taken in a previous chapter. The memory of Charles Abbott's Hendon villa is preserved in the name, style, and title of Lord Tenterden, of Hendon, in the county of Middlesex. Indeed, lawyers have for many generations manifested much fondness for fresh air; the impure atmosphere of their courts in past time apparently whetting their appetites for wholesome breezes.
Throughout the eighteenth century Lincoln's Inn Fields, an open though disorderly spot, was a great place for the residence of legal magnates. Somers, Nathan Wright, Cowper, Harcourt, successively inhabited Powis House. Chief Justice Parker (subsequently Lord Chancellor Macclesfield) lived there when he engaged Philip Yorke (then an attorney's articled clerk, but afterwards Lord Chancellor of England) to be his son's law tutor. On the south side of the square, Lord Chancellor Henley kept high state in the family mansion that descended to him on the death of his elder brother, and subsequently passed into the hands of the Surgeons, whose modest but convenient college stands upon its site. Wedderburn and Erskine had their mansions in Lincoln's Inn Fields, as well as their suburban villas. And between the lawyers of the Restoration and the judges of George III.'s reign, a large proportion of our most eminent jurists and advocates lived in that square and the adjoining streets; such as Queen Street on the west, Serle Street, Carey Street, Portugal Street, Chancery Lane, on the south and south-east. The reader, let it be observed, may not infer that this quarter was confined to legal residents. The lawyers were the most conspicuous and influential occupants; but they had for neighbors people of higher quality, who, attracted to the square by its openness, or the convenience of its site, or the proximity of the law colleges, made it their place of abode in London. Such names as those of the Earl of Lindsey and the Earl of Sandwich in the seventeenth, and of the Duke of Ancaster and the Duke of Newcastle in the eighteenth century, establish the patrician character of the quarter for many years. Moreover, from the books of popular antiquaries, a long list might be made of wits, men of science, and minor celebrities, who, though in no way personally connected with the law, lived during the same period under the shadow of Lincoln's Inn.
Whilst Lincoln's Inn Fields took rank amongst the most aristocratic quarters of the town, it was as disorderly a square as could be found in all London. Royal suggestions, the labors of a learned committee especially appointed by James I. to decide on a proper system of architecture, and Inigo Jones's magnificent but abortive scheme had but a poor result. In Queen Anne's reign, and for twenty years later, the open space of the fields was daily crowded with beggars, mountebanks, and noisy rabble; and it was the scene of constant uproar and frequent riots. As soon as a nobleman's coach drew up before one of the surrounding mansions, a mob of half-naked rascals swarmed about the equipage, asking for alms in alternate tones of entreaty and menace. Pugilistic encounters, and fights resembling the faction fights of an Irish row, were of daily occurrence there; and when the rabble decided on torturing a bull with dogs, the wretched beast was tied to a stake in the centre of the wide area, and there baited in the presence of a ferocious multitude, and to the diversion of fashionable ladies, who watched the scene from their drawing-room windows. The Sacheverell outrage was wildest in this chosen quarter of noblemen and blackguards; and in George II.'s reign, when Sir Joseph Jekyll, the Master of the Rolls, made himself odious to the lowest class by his Act for laying an excise upon gin, a mob assailed him in the middle of the fields, threw him to the ground, kicked him over and over, and savagely trampled upon him. It was a marvel that he escaped with his life; but with characteristic good humor, he soon made a joke of his ill-usage, saying that until the mob made him their football he had never been master of all the rolls. Soon after this outbreak of popular violence, the inhabitants enclosed the middle of the area with palisades, and turned the enclosure into an ornamental garden. Describing the Fields in 1736, the year in which the obnoxious Act concerning gin became law, James Ralph says, "Several of the original houses still remain, to be a reproach to the rest; and I wish the disadvantageous comparison had been a warning to others to have avoided a like mistake. … But this is not the only quarrel I have to Lincoln's Inn Fields. The area is capable of the highest improvement, might be made a credit to the whole city, and do honor to those who live round it; whereas at present no place can be more contemptible or forbidding; in short, it serves only as a nursery for beggars and thieves, and is a daily reflection on those who suffer it to be in its abandoned condition."
During the eighteenth century, a tendency to establish themselves in the western portion of the town was discernible amongst the great law lords. For instance, Lord Cowper, who during his tenure of the seals resided in Powis House, during his latter years occupied a mansion in Great George Street, Westminster—once a most fashionable locality, but now a street almost entirely given up to civil engineers, who have offices there, but usually live elsewhere. In like manner, Lord Harcourt, moving westwards from Lincoln's Inn Fields, established himself in Cavendish Square. Lord Henley, on retiring from the family mansion in Lincoln's Inn Fields, settled in Grosvenor Square. Lord Camden lived in Hill Street, Berkeley Square. On being entrusted with the sole custody of the seals, Lord Apsley (better known as Lord Chancellor Bathurst) made his first state-progress to Westminster Hall from his house in Dean Street, Soho; but afterwards moving farther west, he built Apsley House (familiar to every Englishman as the late Duke of Wellington's town mansion) upon the site of Squire Western's favorite inn—the 'Hercules' Pillars.'
CHAPTER V.
THE OLD LAW QUARTER.
Fifteen years since the writer of this page used to dine with a conveyancer—a lawyer of an old and almost obsolete school—who had a numerous household, and kept a hospitable table in Lincoln's Inn Fields; but the conveyancer was almost the last of his species. The householding legal resident of the Fields, like the domestic resident of the Temple, has become a feature of the past. Among the ordinary nocturnal population of the square called Lincoln's Inn Fields, may be found a few solicitors who sleep by night where they work by day, and a sprinkling of young barristers and law students who have residential chambers in grand houses that less than a century since were tenanted by members of a proud and splendid aristocracy; but the gentle families have by this time altogether disappeared from the mansions.
But long before this aristocratic secession, the lawyers took possession of a new quarter. The great charm of Lincoln's Inn Fields had been the freshness of the air which played over the open space. So also the recommendation of Great Queen Street had been the purity of its rural atmosphere. Built between 1630 and 1730, that thoroughfare—at present hemmed in by fetid courts and narrow passages—caught the keen breezes of Hampstead, and long maintained a character for salubrity as well as fashion. Of those fine squares and imposing streets which lie between High Holborn and Hampstead, not a stone had been laid when the ground covered by the present Freemason's Tavern was one of the most desirable sites of the metropolis. Indeed, the houses between Holborn and Great Queen Street were not erected till the mansions on the south side of the latter thoroughfare—built long before the northern side—had for years commanded an unbroken view of Holborn Fields. Notwithstanding many gloomy predictions of the evils that would necessarily follow from over-building, London steadily increased, and enterprising architects deprived Lincoln's Inn Fields and Great Queen Street of their rural qualities. Crossing Holborn, the lawyers settled on a virgin plain beyond the ugly houses which had sprung up on the north of Great Queen Street, and on the country side of Holborn. Speedily a new quarter arose, extending