Close by where the Victoria Embankment ends at Blackfriars Bridge and extending broadly to the north was the Black Friars Monastery, dating from 1276. This Monastery grew in time to great importance because of the favours bestowed upon it by Edward I. Here this king deposited the heart of his beloved queen Eleanor although her body was placed in Westminster Abbey. And it was here, in 1529, Cardinals Wolsey and Campeggio gave judgment against Catherine of Aragon in her divorce.
Playhouse Yard covers the site of the first theatre set up in the Blackfriars neighbourhood. The larger part of the Monastery was demolished by Sir Thomas Cawarden, Master of the King's Revels, when it was granted to him by Edward VI. Cawarden's executor, Sir William More, continued the demolition, granting a bit of the site for the Blackfriars Theatre to James Burbage the actor. Burbage conducted the Blackfriars Theatre as a private playhouse, in contrast to the public theatres of the time. Nobility supported it almost entirely. Unlike the other playhouses the pit as well as the galleries was entirely roofed over. Also in the pit there were seats, an unusual feature. In ordinary theatres the pit was filled with persons who ate, drank and made merry while the play went on as best it could, but at the Blackfriars nothing of the sort was permitted. There was, too, an unusually good orchestra, the musicians paying for the privilege of performing here where they were sure of attracting the attention of the nobility.
Famous Bridewell Prison, founded by King Edward VI., stood on what is now the westerly side of New Bridge near by Tudor Street. Fleet Brook occupied the space which is now New Bridge Street, extending as far as to the Holborn Viaduct of this day. The prison got its name from the holy spring of St. Bride's in this neighbourhood, the waters of which were supposed to effect miraculous cures. Before the prison was built, the site was occupied by the Palace of the Bridewell. Here the Lords of Court together with the Mayor and Aldermen were summoned by Henry VIII. when he was smitten with love for Anne Boleyn, to hear of the scruples that tormented him because of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon. It was here, too, that Shakespeare places an act of his play of Henry VIII.
The wonderful City of London was once a cluster of huts on a wooded slope of ground which in these days is known as Ludgate Hill. Roman London was enclosed by a wall which extended from about where the Tower is now to Ludgate Hill, and from Ludgate Circus to the Thames River. It had several gates now called to mind by the streets Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Moorgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgate, Newgate and Ludgate. This wall was built of brick and cement as hard as stone. The old Lud Gate stood about three parts of the way down Ludgate Hill and the name was derived from the legendary king, Lud. It was removed in 1760.
St. Martin's Church on Ludgate Hill was built by Wren, but an older church stood there before the Great Fire, and in this Cadwallo, King of the Britons was buried in 677. The tall and simple spire of the present structure contrasts strangely with nearby St. Paul's, and it is with St. Martin's partly in mind that one poet wrote:
Lo, like a bishop upon dainties fed,
St. Paul's lifts up his sacredotal head;
While his lean curates, slim and lank to view,
Around him point their steeples to the blue.
On the west side of Old Bailey the second house south of Ship Court, numbered 68, is where Jonathan Wild world-famed thief and receiver of stolen goods, lived. He was hanged at Tyburn in 1725 and true to himself to the last stole the pocket-book of the parson who accompanied him in the cart on the way to the gallows. Henry Fielding wrote of the career of this noted criminal in his novel "Jonathan Wild."
Where Farringdon Street is now once flowed the Fleet Brook, so wide that ships sailed through it as far as to where Holborn Viaduct is to-day. In its course the Fleet passed through a deep cut called the Hole Bourne. From this came the name Holborn. The Viaduct of to-day bridges the Hole Bourne of old. On the east side of the Fleet Brook lay the notorious Fleet Prison for debtors close by where Fleet Lane is in this day. The main gate house of the prison was on the site of the nearby Congregational Memorial Hall. The clandestine Fleet marriages in this noisome place became notorious, being performed without let or hindrance and with no regard for existing laws, by unscrupulous clergymen among the debt prisoners encouraged by attendants who reaped ill gotten gains for their services. Outside the prison regular "runners" gathered in couples and gave every opportunity and encouragement for quick and illegal marriage. It was not unusual for two hundred marriages to take place in a single day. In this prison Mr. Pickwick of Dickens' "Pickwick Papers," was confined after he refused to pay the damages awarded to Mrs. Bardell. In 1846 the Fleet was demolished.
In the narrow passageway called Gunpowder Alley, jutting off Shoe Lane to the westward, Richard Lovelace died in a cellar, literally of starvation, in 1658. The house on the north side, second from Shoe Lane, stands on the site. Lovelace was the handsomest and most accomplished of the group of poets who gathered around Queen Henrietta. He was committed to prison in 1646 on account of his rebellious sympathy for Charles I., and on his release went to France to raise a regiment. He wrote to Lucy Sacheverell, to whom he was engaged, the poem containing the lines:
I could not love thee, dear, so much
Loved I not honour more.