“His Lordship wants to know what you will take?” asks the counsel again; this time bawling as loud as ever he can in the old lady’s ear.
“I thank his lordship kindly,” the ancient dame answers stoutly, “and if it’s no illconwenience to him, I’ll take a little warm ale!”
And, amid a roar of laughter from the spectators, we quit the Court of Queen’s Bench.
Nor must we linger, either, beneath William Rufus’s carved roof-tree, so ingeniously heightened, and otherwise transmogrified, by Sir Charles Barry and his satellites. This is a different Westminster Hall to that which I knew in my childhood, just after the great fire of ’34. There was no great stained glass window at the end then, no brazen Gothic candelabra, no golden House of Lords in the corridor beyond, where the eye is dazzled with the gilding, the frescoes, the scarlet benches and rich carpets, and where the Lord High Chancellor sits on the woolsack, like an allegory of Themis in the midst of a blaze of fireworks. In my time, the keeper of her Majesty’s conscience and the Great Seal sat in a panelled room, like a dissenting chapel. Let us hasten forth from the Great Hall, for it is full of memories. I spoke of famous footsteps on the Mall, St. James’s; how many thousand footsteps—thousands?—millions rather, have been lost here in fruitless pacing up and down! Westminster Hall is always cool: well it may be so; the dust was laid and the air refrigerated centuries since by the tears and the sighs of ruined suitors. What a wondrous place the old hall is! what reminiscences it conjures up—they will not be laid in the Red Sea—of the gorgeous banquets of the Plantagenets, of the trials of Laud and Strafford, and of Laud and Strafford’s master; of Mr. Jonathan Wild’s ancestor walking the hall with a straw in his shoe; of poor little Lady Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley, her husband, standing their trial here on a velvet-covered platform in the midst of the hall, for treason to Bloody Mary. Did they ever cut a state prisoner’s head off in Westminster Hall, I wonder, as they did Mary Stuart’s in the hall at Fotheringay? The place is large enough.
TEN O’CLOCK A.M.: INTERIOR OF THE QUEEN’S BENCH PRISON.
Once again I stand within the precincts of the Queen’s Bench; but where is my Lord Owlett, where the bewigged barristers and the jury-box with the “twelve honest men” within wiping their semperperspiring foreheads? I am standing in the centre of a vast gravelled area, bounded on the south side by a brick wall of tremendous height, and crowned by those curious arrangements of geometrical spikes known as chevaux de frise. To the north there is a range of ordinary-looking houses, the numbers of which are painted very conspicuously in white characters on a black ellipse above the doors, about which, moreover, there is this peculiarity, that they are always open. If you peep through the yawning portals, you will see that the staircases are of stone, and that the roofs of the rooms on the ground-floor are vaulted. There are no barred windows, no bolts, bars, or grim chains apparent, though from the back windows of these houses there is a pleasant prospect of another high wall, equally surmounted with chevaux de frise. When the spider has got the fly comfortably into his web, and has satisfied himself that he can’t get out, I daresay that he does not take the trouble to handcuff him. In the midst of this gravelled area stands a pump, known as the “Dolphin;” to the right of this institution, and somewhat in the back-ground, is a great square building, called the “State House.” The rooms here are double the size to those in the houses I have alluded to, and are accorded by the governor of the place as a matter of favour to those inmates of the—well, the college—who can afford to fill them with a sufficient quantity of furniture. Close to the State House is a strong iron gateway, through which the guardians of the college have a strong disinclination to allow the under-graduates to pass, unless they be furnished with a certain mysterious document called “a discharge.” The guardians themselves are ruddy men with very big keys; but they seem on the very best terms with the gentlemen whose intended exercise outside the walls they feel compelled (doubtless through solicitude for their precious health) to debar, and are continually bidding them “good morning” in the most affable manner; it being also one of their idiosyncrasies to rub their noses with the handles of the big keys while going through the salutation. In days not very remote there were certain succursals, or chapels of ease, to the college, in the shape of dingy tenements in the borough of Southwark, extending as far as the Elephant and Castle; and in these tenements, which were called the “Rules,” such collegians as were in a position to offer a fantastic guarantee entitled a “Bail Bond,” were permitted to dwell, and thence they wrote letters to their friends and relations, stating that the iron was entering into their souls, and that they were languishing—well, never mind where—in college. These “rules” were abolished in the early years of her present Majesty’s reign; and at the same time a stern Secretary of State prohibited the renewal of a notable saturnalia called “a Mock Election,” of which no less celebrated an artist than Haydon painted a picture (he was himself a collegian at the time), which was bought, for considerably more than it was worth, by King George IV. The saturnalia was fast falling into desuetude by itself; but the Home Secretary also interfered to put a stop to the somewhat boisterous conviviality which had reigned among those collegians who had money, from time immemorial, and which had converted the Queen’s Bench into a den of the most outrageous and disgraceful dissipation and revelry. Under the present not very stringent regulations (considering what a carcere duro is, the other alma mater of Whitecross Street, to say nothing of the hideous place called Horsemonger Lane), the collegians are restricted to the consumption of one quart of beer—which they may have just as strong as ever they like—or one imperial pint of wine, per diem, at their option; yet it is a very curious fact, that no collegian who was flush of cash was ever found to labour under any difficulty in providing sufficient refreshment for his friends when he gave a wine party in his room. The payment of rent is unknown in the college; and it is but rarely that the time-honoured system of “chummage,” or quartering two or mere collegians in one room, and allowing the richest to pay his companions a stipulated sum to go out and find quarters elsewhere, is resorted to. As a rule, the collegian on his arrival, after spending one night in a vaulted apartment close to the entrance, and which bears a strong resemblance to the Gothic vault described in “Rookwood”—an apartment known as the “receiving ward”—has allotted to him, by solemnly-written ticket, a whitewashed chamber of tolerable size, moderately haunted by mice, and “passably” infested by fleas. Straightway there starts up, as it were from the bowels of the earth, a corpulent female rubicund in countenance, tumbled in garments, and profuse in compliments, assuring him that he is the very “Himage of the Markis of Scatterbrass, which his aunt let him out by composing with his creditors,” or “Capting Spurbox, of the Hoss Guards, as ’ad champagne hevery mornin’, and went through the court payin’ nothink.” She, for a small weekly stipend—say, five shillings—agrees to furnish your room; and in an astonishingly short space of time you find the bare cube transformed into a sufficiently comfortable bed-room and sitting-room. For eighteenpence a week extra you may have a double green baize door with brass nails, like a verdant coffin, and white dimity curtains to your windows, with real tassels. In the train of the stout tumbled female, there always follows a gaunt woman of no particular age, with ropy hair, a battered bonnet, and scanty garments apparently nailed to her angular form, who expresses, with many curtsies, her desire to “do for you.” Don’t be alarmed; she simply means that for three or four shillings a week she will clean your room, boil your kettle, and bring up the dinner, which has been cooked for you in the common kitchen of the college. She, too, has an acolyte, a weazened old man in a smock frock and knee shorts (though I think that he must be dead or have left college by this time[3]) who for a shilling a week will make your boots shine like mirrors; who resides here, and has resided here for many years, because he can’t or won’t pay thirty pounds, and who is reported to be worth a mint of money. So here the collegian lives, and makes as merry as he can under adverse circumstances. The same tender precautions adopted by the authorities of the college to prevent the unnecessary egress of those in statu pupillari, are enforced to preserve a due state of morality among them. There is a chapel, as there is an infirmary, within the walls; the lady collegians, of whom there is always a small number in hold, are kept in jealous seclusion. Dicing and card-playing are strictly prohibited, and contumacious contravention of the rules involves the probability of the recalcitrant student being immured in a locus penitentiæ called the “Strong Room.” There he is kept for four and twenty hours, without tobacco. Horrible punishment! This is in the college attached to her Majesty’s Bench. Pshaw! Why should I beat about the Bench, or the bush, any longer, or even endorse the quibble adopted by those collegians who wish to have their letters addressed to them genteelly, of “No. 1, Belvidere Place?” That which I have been describing is a debtors’ jail—the Queen’s Prison, in fact.
And what of the collegians—the prisoners—themselves? It is ten o’clock in the morning, and they are sauntering about in every variety of shabby deshabille, smoking pipes after their meagre breakfasts, walking arm in arm with one another, or with friends who have come to see them, and whose ingress is permitted from nine a.m. until seven p.m. None are allowed to enter after that hour; but those visitors already in are allowed to stop till nine in the evening. Some of the collegian prisoners, poor fellows, have women and little children with them, who are very silly and sentimental, in their illogical way; but you may depend on it that, in nine out of ten of these groups, the staple theme of conversation is the probability of the captive being “out next week.” They are always going to be out next week, these caged birds; but they die sometimes in the Bench, for all that.