King Henry VI., Part I., Act ii., sc. 4.
The books of the Middle Temple do not commence till the reign of King Henry VII., the first treasurer named in them being John Brooke, in the sixteenth year of Henry VII. (1500-1). Readers were not appointed till the following year, the earliest being John Vavasour—probably son of the judge, and not, as Dugdale calls him, the judge himself, who had then been on the bench for twelve years. Members of the house might be excused from living in commons on account of their wives being in town, or for other special reasons (Foss).
In the last year of Philip and Mary (1558) eight gentlemen of the Temple were expelled the society and committed to the Fleet for wilful disobedience to the Bench, but on their humble submission they were readmitted. A year before this a severe Act of Parliament was passed, prohibiting Templars wearing beards of more than three weeks' growth, upon pain of a forty-shilling fine, and double for every week after monition. The young lawyers were evidently getting too foppish. They were required to cease wearing Spanish cloaks, swords, bucklers, rapiers, gowns, hats, or daggers at their girdles. Only knights and benchers were to display doublets or hose of any light colour, except scarlet and crimson, or to affect velvet caps, scarf-wings to their gowns, white jerkins, buskins, velvet shoes, double shirt-cuffs, or feathers or ribbons in their caps. More over, no attorney was to be admitted into either house. These monastic rules were intended to preserve the gravity of the profession, and must have pleased the Poloniuses and galled the Mercutios of those troublous days.
In Elizabeth's days Master Gerard Leigh, a pedantic scholar of the College of Heralds, persuaded the misguided Inner Temple to abandon the old Templar arms—a plain red cross on a shield argent, with a lamb bearing the banner of the sinless profession, surmounted by a red cross. The heraldic euphuist substituted for this a flying Pegasus striking out the fountain of Hippocrene with its hoofs, with the appended motto of "Volat ad astera virtus," a recondite allusion to men, like Chaucer and Gower, who, it is said, had turned from lawyers to poets.
CHAPTER XV
THE TEMPLE (continued)
The Middle Temple Hall: its Roof, Busts, and Portraits—Manningham's Diary—Fox Hunts in Hall—The Grand Revels—Spenser—Sir J. Davis—A Present to a King—Masques and Royal Visitors at the Temple—Fires in the Temple—The Last Great Revel in the Hall—Temple Anecdotes—The Gordon Riots—John Scott and his Pretty Wife—Colman "Keeping Terms"—Blackstone's "Farewell"—Burke—Sheridan—A Pair of Epigrams—Hare Court—The Barber's Shop—Johnson and the Literary Club—Charles Lamb—Goldsmith: his Life, Troubles, and Extravagances—"Hack Work" for Booksellers—The Deserted Village—She Stoops to Conquer—Goldsmith's Death and Burial.
In the glorious reign of Elizabeth the old Middle Temple Hall was converted into chambers, and a new hall built. The present roof (says Mr. Peter Cunningham) is the best piece of Elizabethan architecture in London. The screen, in the Renaissance style, was long supposed to be an exact copy of the Strand front of Old Somerset House; but this is a vulgar error; nor could it have been made of timber from the Spanish Armada, for the simple reason that it was set up thirteen years before the Armada was organised. The busts of "doubting" Lord Eldon and his brother, Lord Stowell, the great Admiralty judge, are by Behnes. The portraits are chiefly second-rate copies. The exterior was cased with stone, in "wretched taste," in 1757. The diary of an Elizabethan barrister, named Manningham, preserved in the Harleian Miscellanies, has preserved the interesting fact that in this hall in February, 1602—probably, says Mr. Collier, six months after its first appearance at the Globe—Shakespeare's Twelfth Night was acted.
"Feb. 2, 1601 (2).—At our feast," says Manningham, "we had a play called Twelve Night, or What you Will, much like the Comedy of Errors or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni. A good practice in it is to make the steward believe his lady widdowe was in love with him, by counterfayting a letter, as from his lady, in generall terms telling him what shee liked best in him, and prescribing his gestures, inscribing his apparaile, &c., and then, when he came to practise, making him believe they tooke him to be mad."