At the Restoration, the Marquis of Newcastle,—the author of a magnificent book on horsemanship—and his pedantic wife, whom Scott has sketched so well in "Peveril of the Peak," inhabited a part of Dorset House; but whether Great Dorset House or Little Dorset House, topographers do not record. "Great Dorset House," says Mr. Peter Cunningham, quoting Lady Anne Clifford's "Memoirs," "was the jointure house of Cicely Baker, Dowager Countess of Dorset, who died in it in 1615 (James I.)."
FALLING IN OF THE CHAPEL AT BLACKFRIARS
CHAPTER XVIII
BLACKFRIARS
Three Norman Fortresses on the Thames' Bank—The Black Parliament—The Trial of Katherine of Arragon—Shakespeare a Blackfriars Manager—The Blackfriars Puritans—The Jesuit Sermon at Hunsdon House—Fatal Accident—Extraordinary Escapes—Queen Elizabeth at Lord Herbert's Marriage—Old Blackfriars Bridge—Johnson and Mylne—Laying of the Stone—The Inscription—A Toll Riot—Failure of the Bridge—The New Bridge—Bridge Street—Sir Richard Phillips and his Works—Painters in Blackfriars—The King's Printing Office—Printing House Square—The Times and its History—Walter's Enterprise—War with the Dispatch—- The gigantic Swindling Scheme exposed by the Times—Apothecaries' Hall—Quarrel with the College of Physicians.
On the river-side, between St. Paul's and Whitefriars, there stood, in the Middle Ages, three Norman fortresses. Castle Baynard and the old tower of Mountfiquet were two of them. Baynard Castle, granted to the Earls of Clare and afterwards rebuilt by Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, was the palace in which the Duke of Buckingham offered the crown to his wily confederate, Richard the Crookback. In Queen Elizabeth's time it was granted to the Earls of Pembroke, who lived there in splendour till the Great Fire melted their gold, calcined their jewels, and drove them into the fashionable flood that was already moving westward. Mountfiquet Castle was pulled down in 1276, when Hubert de Berg, Earl of Kent, transplanted a colony of Black Dominican friars from Holborn, near Lincoln's Inn, to the river-side, south of Ludgate Hill. Yet so conservative is even Time in England, that a recent correspondent of Notes and Queries points out a piece of mediæval walling and the fragment of a buttress, still standing, at the foot of the Times Office, in Printing House Square, which seem to have formed part of the stronghold of the Mountfiquets. This interesting relic is on the left hand of Queen Victoria Street, going up from the bridge, just where there was formerly a picturesque but dangerous descent by a flight of break-neck stone steps. At the right-hand side of the same street stands an old rubble chalk wall, even older. It is just past the new house of the Bible Society, and seems to have formed part of the old City wall, which at first ended at Baynard Castle. The rampart advanced to Mountfiquet, and, lastly, to please and protect the Dominicans, was pushed forward outside Ludgate to the Fleet, which served as a moat, the Old Bailey being an advanced work.