CHAPTER III
THE TEMPLE CHURCH
It is natural to turn from this story of the Templars to the Round Church in the Temple, which is their chief memorial. We leave the roar and rattle of Fleet Street, and pass through the low Gateway of the Inner Temple into the narrow lane which leads us between the gross modern buildings, called after Oliver Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson, to the west end of the Church—the west end, which is formed by the round building which we have already mentioned.
The Gate-House beneath which we have passed is in itself a building of no ordinary interest. It is, as we now see it, a modern (1905) version of an old timber and rough-cast house, with projecting upper stories, pleasantly contrasting with the Palladian splendour of the adjoining Bank. It was built ‘over and beside the gateway and the lane’ in 1610 by one John Bennett, and was perhaps designed by Inigo Jones. The room on the first floor was, there is every reason to suppose, used by the Prince of Wales as his Council Chamber for the Duchy of Cornwall. It contains some fine Jacobean and Georgian panelling, an admirable eighteenth-century staircase, and an elaborate and beautiful Jacobean plaster ceiling, with the initials, motto, and feathers of Prince Henry, who died 1612.
This is No. 17, Fleet Street. No. 16, to the west of it, with the sign of the Pope’s Head, was the shop of Bernard Lintot, who published Pope’s ‘Homer,’ and later of Jacob Robinson, the bookseller and publisher, with whom Edmund Burke lodged when ‘eating his dinners’ as a student of the Middle Temple.
The Gate-House escaped the Fire of London, and, having been restored, is now preserved to the public use by the London County Council.[17] It forms an appropriate introduction to those narrow lanes and quiet Courts and that lovely Church, whose pavements once resounded with the tread of the mail-clad champions of Christendom, and echo now with the softer footfall of bewigged, begowned Limbs of the Law. Dull and prosaic must he be indeed who cannot here feel the thrill of imagination which stirred the soul of Tom Pinch as he wandered through these Courts:
‘Every echo of his footsteps sounded to him like a sound from the old walls and pavements, wanting language to relate the histories of the dim, dismal rooms; to tell him what lost documents were decaying in forgotten corners of the shut-up cellars, from whose lattices such mouldy sighs came breathing forth as he went past; to whisper of dark bins of rare old wine, bricked up in vaults among the old foundations of the Halls; or mutter in a lower tone yet darker legends of the cross-legged knights, whose marble effigies were in the Church’ (‘Martin Chuzzlewit’).
The Round part of the Church of the Knights Templars, which we now see lying below us, is one of the very few instances of Norman work left in London—the only instance, save the superb fragments of St. Bartholomew’s Church and the splendid whole of the Tower of London. It was dedicated, as we have seen, in 1185 to St. Mary by Heraclius, Patriarch of Jerusalem. This fact was recorded on a stone over the door, engraved in the time of Elizabeth, and said by Stow to be an
INTERIOR OF THE TEMPLE CHURCH