St. Antholin's perished in the Great Fire, and the present church was completed by Wren, in the year 1682, at the expense of about £5,700. After the fire the parish of St. John Baptist, Watling Street, was annexed to that of St. Antholin, the latter paying five-eighths towards the repairs of the church, the former the remaining three-eighths. The interior of the church is peculiar, being covered with an oval-shaped dome, which is supported on eight columns, which stand on high plinths. The carpentry of the roof, says Mr. Godwin, displays constructive knowledge. The exterior of the building, says the same authority, is of pleasing proportions, and shows great powers of invention. As an apology for adding a Gothic spire to a quasi-Grecian church, Wren has, oddly enough, crowned the spire with a small Composite capital, which looks like the top of a pencil-case. Above this is the vane. The steeple rises to the height of 154 feet.
THE CRYPT OF GERARD'S HALL
The church was rebuilt by John Tate, a mercer, in 1513; and Strype mentions the erection in 1623 of a rich and beautiful gallery with fifty-two compartments, filled with the coats-of-arms of kings and nobles, ending with the blazon of the Elector Palatine. A new morning prayer and lecture was established here by clergymen inclined to Puritanical principles in 1599. The bells began to ring at five in the morning, and were considered Pharisaical and intolerable by all High Churchmen in the neighbourhood. The extreme Geneva party made a point of attending these early prayers. Lilly, the astrologer, went to these lectures when a young man; and Scott makes Mike Lambourne, in "Kenilworth," refer to them. Nor have they been overlooked by our early dramatists. Randolph, Davenant, and others make frequent allusions in their plays to the Puritanical fervour of this parish. The tongue of Middleton's "roaring girl" was "heard further in a still morning than St. Antlin's bell."
In the heart of the City, and not far from London Stone, was a house which used to be inhabited by the Lord Mayor or one of the sheriffs, situated so near to the Church of St. Antholin that there was a way out of it into a gallery of the church. The commissioners from the Church of Scotland to King Charles were lodged here in 1640. At St. Antholin's preached the chaplains of the commission, with Alexander Henderson at their head; "and curiosity, faction, and humour brought so great a conflux and resort, that from the first appearance of day in the morning, on every Sunday, to the shutting in of the light, the church was never empty."
Dugdale also mentions the church. "Now for an essay," he says, "of those whom, under colour of preaching the Gospel, in sundry parts of the realm, they set up a morning lecture at St. Antholine's Church in London; where (as probationers for that purpose) they first made tryal of their abilities, which place was the grand nursery whence most of the seditious preachers were after sent abroad throughout all England to poyson the people with their anti-monarchical principles."
In Watling Street is the chief station of the London Fire Brigade. The Metropolitan Board of Works has consolidated and reorganised, under Captain Shaw, the whole system of the Fire Brigade into one homogeneous municipal institution. The insurance companies contribute about £10,000 per annum towards its maintenance, the Treasury £10,000, and a Metropolitan rate of one halfpenny in the pound raises an additional sum of £30,000, making about £50,000 in all. Under the old system there were seventeen fire-stations, guarding an area of about ten square miles, out of 110 which comprise the Metropolitan district. At the commencement of 1868 there were forty-three stations in an area of about 110 square miles. From Captain Shaw's report, presented January 1, 1873, it appears that during the year 1872 there had been three deaths in the brigade, 236 cases of ordinary illness, and 100 injuries, making a total of 336 cases. The strength of the brigade was as follows:—50 fire-engine stations, 106 fire-escape stations, 4 floating stations, 52 telegraph lines, 84 miles of telegraph lines, 3 floating steam fire-engines, 8 large land steam fire-engines, 17 small ditto, 72 other fire-engines, 125 fire-escapes, 396 firemen. The number of watches kept up throughout the metropolis is 98 by day, and 175 by night, making a total of 273 in every twenty-four hours. The remaining men, except those sick, injured, or on leave, are available for general work at fires.
If Stow is correct, St. Mary's Aldermary, Watling Street, was originally called Aldermary because it was older than St. Mary's Bow, and, indeed, any other church in London dedicated to the Virgin; but this is improbable. The first known rector of Aldermary was presented before the year 1288. In 1703 two of the turrets were blown down. In 1855 a building, supposed to be the crypt of the old church, fifty feet long and ten feet wide, and with five arches, was discovered under some houses in Watling Street. In the chancel is a beautifully sculptured tablet by Bacon, with this peculiarity, that it bears no inscription. Surely the celebrated "Miserrimus" itself could hardly speak so strongly of humility or despair. Or can it have been, says a cynic, a monument ordered by a widow, who married again before she had time to write the epitaph to the "dear departed?" On one of the walls is a tablet to the memory of that celebrated surgeon of St. Bartholomew's for forty-two years, Percival Pott, Esq., F.R.S., who died in 1788. Pott, according to a memoir written by Sir James Cask, succeeded to a good deal of the business of Sir Cæsar Hawkins. Pott seems to have entertained a righteous horror of amputations.
The following curious epitaph is worth preserving:—