The walls of the massive tower, four stories high, are striped with diagonal lines of darker brick. The entrance, under an obtusely-pointed arch, was originally vaulted. The groining has disappeared, but the front still bears, in a heraldic compartment over the arch, the arms of Henry VIII. within the Garter, and crowned, having on the dexter side the purple lion of Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, and on the sinister the arms and quarterings of Sir Thomas Lovell.
The bricks of which this Gatehouse and the outer wall of Lincoln’s Inn are built have an interest beyond their colour and their age. For upon the task of laying them ‘Rare Ben Jonson’
OLD SQUARE, LINCOLN’S INN
Showing the interior side of the gateway, built in 1518. Ben Jonson worked as a bricklayer on this gatehouse.
is said to have laboured, trowel in hand and book in pocket. Aubrey, in his ‘Lives,’ records that Ben Jonson worked some time with his father-in-law, a bricklayer, ‘and particularly on the garden wall of Lincoln’s Inne, next to Chancery Lane.... A bencher, walking thro’ and hearing him repeat some Greeke verses out of Homer, and finding him to have a wit extraordinary, gave him some exhibition to maintain him at Trinity College in Cambridge.’ This is only a tradition, though a very likely one; and, as Leigh Hunt says, tradition is valuable when it helps to make such a flower grow out of an old wall.
Within the Gatehouse a small Quadrangle is formed by the Chapel, Old Library, and the two wings of Old Buildings. Octagonal turret-staircases fill the corners of these brick buildings, and in the turret at the South-East corner lived Thurloe, who was Secretary of State to Oliver Cromwell. A tablet in Chancery Lane, on the outer face of the building, records this fact, whilst the Treasurership of William Pitt in 1794 is apparently thought so little worthy of memorial that the sundial which once commemorated it has been allowed to disappear.[51] A portrait by Gainsborough of that great Statesman hangs in the Benchers’ Room. Tradition has it that Oliver Cromwell once had chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, an idea which probably sprang from the fact that Richard Cromwell was a student here in 1647.
The brick buildings forming this Court within the Gatehouse were constructed during James’s reign, and it was then decided to build ‘a fair large chapel, with three double chambers under the same,’[52] in place of the one then standing, which had grown ruinous, and was no longer large enough for the Society. This older chapel, which did not stand on precisely the same site, was dedicated to St. Richard of Chichester. The new chapel was raised on arches, which form in themselves a tiny cloister, and produce a pleasing and unexpected effect amid these dusty purlieus of the Law.
The Chapel of Lincoln’s Inn, which was designed, according to Dugdale, by Inigo Jones, in his Gothic manner, and in which Dr. Donne, the witty prelate and great poet, preached the first sermon on Ascension Day, 1623, suffered even more than the Church of the Templars at the hands of the destructive Gothic Revivalists. The Chapel was needlessly enlarged. The buttresses were stuccoed. The beautiful proportions, which Inigo Jones, like all the truly great architects, knew how to impart to his buildings, were wantonly and inexcusably destroyed.