GRINNING SKULLS.
The most terrible reminiscence of the bridge is connected with the fact that its gate-houses at either end were garnished for many hundreds of years by the heads of many great and good men as well as of bad and depraved villains, whose skulls were exposed on spikes to dry and bleach in the sun.
The heads of Sir William Wallace, 1305; Simon Frisel, 1306; four traitor knights, 1397; Lord Bardolf, 1308; Bolingbroke, 1440; Jack Cade and his rebels, 1451; the Cornish traitors of 1497, and of Fisher, Bishop of Rochester (displaced in fourteen days after by that of Sir Thomas More, 1335), have adorned this ghostly bridge. From 1578 to 1605, it was a common sight to see the heads of Roman Catholic priests exposed on this bridge, their offence being that they sought to preach their doctrines in London. Finally, in the reign of Charles II., this display of bare, grinning skulls was transferred to Temple Bar.
TEMPLE BAR, FLEET STREET.
Temple Bar, as it is called, is a large, gray archway, which spans Fleet street in its busiest traffic and jam. The archway was formerly the limit of the City of London, and when a sovereign came westward from Westminster, or eastward from the Tower, to make a formal entry, the Lord Mayor and the City Councils, in robes of state, were present under its historic archway to offer the keys and admit the Sovereign. The rusty gates were then rolled back, and on such occasions the pageants were very fine.
For over a hundred years the London traders and shopkeepers, and the students of the Temple, were regaled with the daily and ghastly sight of a row of grinning and socketless skulls, which were ranged in lines on cruel spikes above the architrave of Temple Bar. There is an empty room in the upper story which has a terrible history, for here heads were boiled in pitch before being exposed.
In 1737, Eustace Budgell, a cousin of Addison and a contributor to the Spectator, when reduced to poverty, took a boat at Somerset Stairs, and ordering the waterman to row down the river, threw himself into the flood as the boat shot London Bridge. He had filled his pockets with stones, and he left behind him a slip of paper on which was written, "What Cato did and Addison approved cannot be wrong." This was a great puff for Addison's tragedy. Edward Osborne, an apprentice of Sir William Hewet, afterwards Lord Mayor, jumped from the window of one of the bridge houses, in 1536, to save his master's daughter, an infant, and years afterwards he was rewarded with her hand in marriage, and became Lord Mayor himself. The grandson of the apprentice became Duke of Leeds and the founder of the present ducal house of that name. No bridge ever constructed had such a history as that of Old London Bridge.