The modern Merchant Taylors' Hall (says Herbert) is a spacious but irregular edifice of brick. The front exhibits an arched portal, consisting of an arched pediment, supported on columns of the Composite order, with an ornamental niche above; in the pediment are the Company's arms. The hall itself is a spacious and handsome apartment, having at the lower end a stately screen of the Corinthian order, and in the upper part a very large mahogany table thirty feet long. The sides of the hall have numerous emblazoned shields of masters' arms, and behind the master's seat are inscribed in golden letters the names of the different sovereigns, dukes, earls, lords spiritual and temporal, &c., who have been free of this community. In the drawing-room are full-length portraits of King William and Queen Mary, and other sovereigns; and in the court and other rooms are half-lengths of Henry VIII. and Charles II., of tolerable execution, besides various other portraits, amongst which are those of Sir Thomas White, Lord Mayor in 1553, the estimable founder of St. John's College, Cambridge, and Sir Thomas Rowe, Lord Mayor in 1568, and Mr. Clarkson's picture of Henry VII. presenting the Company with their incorporation charter. In this painting the king is represented seated on his throne, and delivering the charter to the Master, Wardens, and Court of Assistants of the Company. His attendants are Archbishop Warham, the Chancellor, and Fox, Bishop of Winchester, Lord Privy Seal, on his right hand; and on his left, Robert Willoughby, Lord Broke, then Lord Steward of the Household. In niches are shown the statues of Edward III. and John of Gaunt, the king's ancestors. In the foreground the clerk of the Company is exhibiting the roll with the names of the kings, &c., who were free of this Company. In the background are represented the banners of the Company and of the City of London. The Yeomen of the Guard, at the entrance of the palace, close the view. On the staircase are likewise pictures of the following Lord Mayors, Merchant Taylors:—Sir William Turner, 1669; Sir P. Ward, 1681; Sir William Pritchard, 1683; and Sir John Salter, 1741.
The interior of the "New Hall, or Taylors' Inne," was adorned with costly tapestry, or arras, representing the history of St. John the Baptist. It had a screen, supporting a silver image of that saint in a tabernacle, or, according to an entry of 1512, "an ymage of St. John gilt, in a tabernacle gilt." The hall windows were painted with armorial bearings; the floor was regularly strewed with clean rushes; from the ceiling hung silk flags and streamers; and the hall itself was furnished, when needful, with tables on tressels, covered on feast days with splendid table linen, and glittering with plate.
The Merchant Taylors have for their armorial ensigns—Argent, a tent royal between two parliament robes; gules, lined ermine, on a chief azure, a lion of England. Crest—a Holy Lamb, in glory proper. Supporters—two camels, or. Motto—"Concordia parvæ res crescunt."
The stained glass windows of the old St. Martin Outwich, as engraven in Wilkinson's history of that church, contain a representation of the original arms, granted by Clarencieux in 1480. They differ from the present (granted in 1586), the latter having a lion instead of the Holy Lamb (which is in the body of the first arms), and which latter is now their crest.
One of the most splendid sights at this hall in the earlier times would have been (says Herbert), of course, when the Company received the high honour of enrolling King Henry VII. amongst their members; and subsequently to which, "he sat openly among them in a gown of crimson velvet on his shoulders," says Strype, "à la mode de Londres, upon their solemn feast day, in the hall of the said Company."
From Merchant Taylors' Hall began the famous cavalcade of the archers, under their leader, as Duke of Shoreditch, in 1530, consisting of 3,000 archers, sumptuously apparelled, 942 whereof wore chains of gold about their necks. This splendid company was guarded by whifflers and billmen, to the number of 4,000, besides pages and footmen, who marched through Broad Street (the residence of the duke their captain). They continued their march through Moorfields, by Finsbury, to Smithfield, where, after having performed their several evolutions, they shot at the target for glory.
The Hall of Commerce, existing some years ago in Threadneedle Street, was begun in 1830 by Mr. Edward Moxhay, a speculative biscuit-baker, on the site of the old French church. Mr. Moxhay had been a shoemaker, but he suddenly started as a rival to the celebrated Leman, in Gracechurch Street. He was an amateur architect of talent, and it was said at the time, probably unjustly, that the building originated in Moxhay's vexation at the Gresham committee rejecting his design for a new Royal Exchange. He opened his great commercial news-room two years before the Exchange was finished, and while merchants were fretting at the delay, intending to make the hall a mercantile centre, to the annihilation of Lloyd's, the Baltic, Garraway's, the Jerusalem, and the North and South American Coffee-houses. £70,000 were laid out. There was a grand bas-relief on the front by Mr. Watson, a young sculptor of promise, and there was an inaugurating banquet. The annual subscription of £5 5s. soon dwindled to £1 10s. 6d. There was a reading-room, and a room where commission agents could exhibit their samples. Wool sales were held there, and there was an auction for railway shares. There were also rooms for meetings of creditors and private arbitrations, and rooms for the deposit of deeds.
A describer of Threadneedle Street in 1845 particularly mentions amongst the few beggars the Creole flower-girls, the decayed ticket-porters, and cripples on go-carts who haunted the neighbourhood, a poor, shrivelled old woman, who sold fruit on a stall at a corner of one of the courts. She was the wife of Daniel Good, the murderer.
The Baltic Coffee House, in Threadneedle Street, used to be the rendezvous of tallow, oil, hemp, and seed merchants; indeed, of all merchants and brokers connected with the Russian trade. There was a time when there was as much gambling in tallow as in Consols, but the breaking down of the Russian monopoly by the increased introduction of South American and Australian tallow has done away with this. Mr. Richard Thornton and Mr. Jeremiah Harman were the two monarchs of the Russian trade forty years ago. The public sale-room was in the upper part of the house. The Baltic was superintended by a committee of management.
That famous free school of the City, St. Anthony's, stood in Threadneedle Street, where the French church afterwards stood, and where the Bank of London now stands. It was originally a Jewish synagogue, granted by Henry V. to the brotherhood of St. Anthony of Vienna. A hospital was afterwards built there for a master, two priests, a schoolmaster, and twelve poor men. The Free School seems to have been built in the reign of Henry VI., who gave five presentations to Eton and five Oxford scholarships, at the rate of ten francs a week each, to the institution. Henry VIII., that arch spoliator, annexed the school to the collegiate church of St. George's, Windsor. The proctors of St. Anthony's used to wander about London collecting "the benevolence of charitable persons towards the building." The school had great credit in Elizabeth's reign, and was a rival of St. Paul's. That inimitable coxcomb, Laneham, in his description of the great visit of Queen Elizabeth to the Earl of Leicester, at Kenilworth Castle, 1575, a book which Sir Walter Scott has largely availed himself of, says—"Yee mervail perchance," saith he, "to see me so bookish. Let me tel you in few words. I went to school, forsooth, both at Polle's and also at St. Antonie's; (was) in the fifth forme, past Esop's Fables, readd Terence, Vos isthæc intro auferte; and began with my Virgil, Tityre tu patulæ. I could say my rules, could construe and pars with the best of them," &c.