GRAYS INN SQUARE
The Hall (on the right) was rebuilt in 1556, and the chapel, covered with greenish stucco (in the centre), is ancient, but has suffered much from wholesale restorations.
the manor to the Canons of St. Bartholomew, to endow a Chaplain. Chaplain and Chapel alike passed to the lawyers along with the Inn, and it is likely enough that the present old Chapel, in spite of plaster and bad stained glass, represents at heart the fourteenth-century Chapel of the Greys.
The earliest mention of it in the existing records of the Society is in the eleventh year of Elizabeth. It was ‘beautified and renewed’ at the end of the seventeenth century, and received a blanket of stucco, a fringe of silly battlements, and an ugly slate roof in the first part of the nineteenth. Some armorial bearings, chiefly of the seventeenth-century Bishops and Archbishops, survive in the Eastern Window of five lights, but much of the painted glass mentioned by Dugdale has disappeared or been removed to the Hall.
Beyond South Square stretches a delightful quadrangle of homogeneous houses, which contains a large gravelled centre, bordered by a few sickly plane-trees. This is Gray’s Inn Square, which, as we have seen, took the place of Coney Court and Chapel Court. It was at No. 1, Coney Court, burnt down in 1678, that Bacon, ‘the greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind,’ is said to have lived. The site of his rooms is covered now by No. 1, Gray’s Inn Square, part of the row of buildings erected in 1868 at the West end of this Court. In 1622 Bacon was granted chambers in the Inn consisting of ‘certayne buildings in Graies Inne [of late called Bacon’s Buildings] for the terme of fiftie years.’
Francis Bacon was entered by his father, the Lord Keeper, on June 27, 1576, together with his four brothers, Nicholas, Nathaniel, Edward, and Anthony. This was that Sir Nicholas who founded the Cursitor’s Office or Inn, from which Cursitor Street takes its name; Cursitor Street, with its bitter memories of sponging-houses and bailiffs, which have been improved away along with the lumbering machinery of the law that made such things possible. Sir Nicholas had been Treasurer of the Inn in 1536. Francis Bacon, in the dedication quoted below, describes Gray’s Inn as ‘the place whence my father was called to the highest place of justice, and where myself have lived and had my proceedings, and therefore few men are so bound to their Societies by obligation both ancestral and personal as I am to yours.’ An Order in the following year, 1577, directed that all the sons of Sir Nicholas Bacon should be ‘of the Grand Company and not be bound to any vacations.’ In the twenty-eighth year of Elizabeth, Francis Bacon was advanced to the Readers’ Table. He was elected Treasurer in 1608.[69] As Solicitor-General he dedicated his ‘Arguments of Law’ to ‘my lovinge friends and fellowes, the Readers, Ancients, Utter Barresters and Students of Graies Inn,’ signing himself ‘your assured loving friend and fellow, F. B.’
It was from Gray’s Inn that the procession of Earls, Barons, Knights and Gentlemen started, which accompanied him to Westminster when he became Lord Keeper. And it was to Gray’s Inn that he returned after his impeachment and fall, coming ‘to lie at his old lodgings,’ and write many of his Treatises and Essays. ‘Those noble studies,’ says Macaulay, the brilliant historian, who himself occupied chambers at No. 8, South Square, in a building that was destroyed to make room for the extension of the Library—‘those noble studies, for which he had found leisure in the midst of professional drudgery and of courtly intrigues, gave to this last sad stage of his life a dignity beyond what power or titles could bestow. Impeached, convicted, sentenced, driven with ignominy from the presence of his Sovereign, shut out from the deliberations of his fellow-nobles, loaded with debt, branded with dishonour, sinking under the weight of years, sorrows and diseases, Bacon was Bacon still.’ He commenced a Digest of the Laws of England, a History of England under the Tudors, a body of Natural History, a Philosophical Romance. ‘He made extensive and valuable additions to his Essays. He published the inestimable treatise, “De Augmentis Scientiarum.” The very trifles with which he amused himself in hours of pain and languor bore the marks of his mind. The best collection of jests in the world is that which he dictated from memory, without referring to any book, on a day on which illness had rendered him incapable of serious study.’ It is the brain and personality of such a genius that haunts this spacious, quiet square of Gray’s Inn. And presently we shall see how upon the Inn itself and its pleasaunces this many-sided mind impressed itself to our advantage.
Through an arch in the far angle of the Square we pass to a narrow, oblong building of the crudest early nineteenth-century type, looking across an ugly wall upon the noisy Gray’s Inn Road. This is the ugly line of Verulam Buildings (1811), which Charles Lamb justly called ‘accursed,’ for they encroached upon the gardens, ‘cutting out delicate crankles, and shouldering away one or two of the stately alcoves of the terrace.’ A postern-gate at the far corner leads out to the junction of Gray’s Inn Road with Theobald’s Road, a dismal thoroughfare, which is bounded by a railing, through which a delightful vista of green trees and turf gladdens the sight of the passer-by—turf and green trees which form the gracious playground of the children for whom the gates are opened each summer evening.