Cardinal Wolsey lived, at some period of his extraordinary career, in a house in Chancery Lane, at the Holborn end, and on the east side, opposite the Six Clerks' Office. We do not know what rank the proud favourite held at this time, whether he was almoner to the king, privy councillor, Canon of Windsor, Bishop of Lincoln, Archbishop of York, or Cardinal of the Cecilia. We like to think that down that dingy legal lane he rode on his way to Westminster Hall, with all that magnificence described by his faithful gentleman usher, Cavendish. He would come out of his chamber, we read, about eight o'clock in his cardinal's robes of scarlet taffeta and crimson satin, with a black velvet tippet edged with sable round his neck, holding in his hand an orange filled with a sponge containing aromatic vinegar, in case the crowd of suitors should in commode him. Before him was borne the broad seal of England, and the scarlet cardinal's hat. A sergeant-at-arms preceded him bearing a great mace of silver, and two gentlemen carrying silver plates. At the hall-door he mounted his mule, trapped with crimson and having a saddle covered with crimson velvet, while the gentlemen ushers, bareheaded, cried,—"On, masters, before, and make room for my lord cardinal." When Wolsey was mounted he was preceded by his two cross-bearers and his two pillow-bearers, all upon horses trapped in scarlet; and four footmen with pole-axes guarded the cardinal till he came to Westminster. And every Sunday, when he repaired to the king's court at Greenwich, he landed at the Three Cranes, in the Vintrey, and took water again at Billingsgate. "He had," says Cavendish, "a long season, ruling all things in the realm appertaining to the king, by his wisdom, and all other matters of foreign regions with whom the king had any occasion to meddle, and then he fell like Lucifer, never to rise again. Here," says Cavendish, "is the end and fall of pride; for I assure you he was in his time the proudest man alive, having more regard to the honour of his person than to his spiritual functions, wherein he should have expressed more meekness and humility."
One of the greatest names connected with Chancery Lane is that of the unfortunate Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, who, after leading his master, Charles I., on the path to the scaffold, was the first to lay his head upon the block. Wentworth, the son of a Yorkshire gentleman, was born in 1593 in Chancery Lane, at the house of Mr. Atkinson, his maternal grandfather, a bencher of Lincoln's Inn. At first an enemy of Buckingham, the king's favourite, and opposed to the Court, he was won over by a peerage and the counsels of his friend Lord Treasurer Weston. He soon became a headlong and unscrupulous advocate of arbitrary power, and, as Lord Deputy of Ireland, did his best to raise an army for the king and to earn his Court name of "Thorough." Impeached for high treason, and accused by Sir Henry Vane of a design to subdue England by force, he was forsaken by the weak king and condemned to the block. "Put not your trust in princes," he said, when he heard of the king's consent to the execution of so faithful a servant, "nor in any child of man, for in them is no salvation." He died on Tower Hill, with calm and undaunted courage, expressing his devotion to the Church of England, his loyalty to the king, and his earnest desire for the peace and welfare of the kingdom.
Of this steadfast and dangerous man Clarendon has left one of those Titianesque portraits in which he excelled. "He was a man," says the historian, "of great parts and extraordinary endowment of nature, and of great observation and a piercing judgment both into things and persons; but his too good skill in persons made him judge the worse of things, and so that upon the matter he wholly relied upon himself; and discerning many defects in most men, he too much neglected what they said or did. Of all his passions his pride was most predominant, which a moderate exercise of ill fortune might have corrected and reformed; and which was by the hand of Heaven strangely punished by bringing his destruction on him by two things that he most despised—the people and Sir Harry Vane. In a word, the epitaph which Plutarch records that Sylla wrote for himself may not be unfitly applied to him—'that no man did ever pass him either in doing good to his friends or in doing harm to his enemies.'"
Izaak Walton, that amiable old angler, lived for some years (1627 to 1644) of his happy and contented life in a house (No. 120) on the west side of Chancery Lane (Fleet Street end). This was many years before he published his "Complete Angler," which did not, indeed, appear till the year before the Restoration. Yet we imagine that at this time the honest citizen often sallied forth to the Lea banks with his friends, the Roes, on those fine cool May mornings upon which he expatiates so pleasantly. A quiet man and a lover of peace was old Izaak; and we may be sure no jingle of money ever hurried him back from the green fields where the lark, singing as she ascended higher and higher into the air, and nearer to the heavens, excelled, as he says, in her simple piety "all those little nimble musicians of the air (her fellows) who warble forth their various ditties with which Nature has furnished them, to the shame of art." Refreshed and exhilarated by the pure country air, we can fancy Walton returning homeward to his Chancery Lane shop, humming to himself that fine old song of Marlowe's which the milkmaid sung to him as he sat under the honeysuckle-hedge out of the shower,—
"Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, or hills, or field,
Or woods, or steepy mountain, yield."
How Byron had the heart to call a man who loved such simple pleasures, and was so guileless and pure-hearted as Walton, "a cruel old coxcomb," and to wish that in his gullet he had a hook, and "a strong trout to pull it," we never could understand; but Byron was no angler, and we suppose he thought Walton's advice about sewing up frogs' mouths, &c., somewhat hard-hearted.
North, in his life of that faithful courtier of Charles II., Lord Keeper Guildford, mentions that his lordship "settled himself in the great brick house in Serjeants' Inn, near Chancery Lane, which was formerly the Lord Chief Justice Hyde's, and that he held it till he had the Great Seal, and some time after. When his lordship lived in this house, before his lady began to want her health, he was in the height of all the felicity his nature was capable of. He had a seat in St. Dunstan's Church appropriated to him, and constantly kept the church in the mornings, and so his house was to his mind; and having, with leave, a door into Serjeants' Inn garden, he passed daily with ease to his chambers, dedicated to business and study. His friends he enjoyed at home, and politic ones often found him out at his chambers." He rebuilt Serjeants' Inn Hall, which had become poor and ruinous, and improved all the dwellings in Chancery Lane from Jackanapes Alley down to Fleet Street. He also drained the street for the first time, and had a rate levied on the unwilling inhabitants, after which his at first reluctant neighbours thanked him warmly. This same Lord Keeper, a time-server and friend of arbitrary power, according to Burnet, seems to have been a learned and studious man, for he encouraged the sale of barometers and wrote a philosophical essay on music. It was this timid courtier that unscrupulous Jeffreys vexed by spreading a report that he had been seen riding on a rhinoceros, then one of the great sights of London. Jeffreys was at the time hoping to supersede the Lord Keeper in office, and was anxious to cover him with ridicule.
Besides the Cæsars, Cecils, Throckmortons, Lincolns, Sir John Franklin, and Edward Reeve, who, according to Mr. Noble, all resided in Chancery Lane, when it was a fashionable legal quarter, we must not forget that on the site of No. 115 lived Sir Richard Fanshawe, the ambassador sent by Charles II. to arrange his marriage with the Portuguese princess. This accomplished man, who translated Guarini's "Pastor Fido," and the "Lusiad" of Camoens, died at Madrid in 1666. His brave yet gentle wife, who wrote some interesting memoirs, gives a graphic account of herself and her husband taking leave of his royal master, Charles I., at Hampton Court. At parting, the king saluted her, and she prayed God to preserve his majesty with long life and happy years. The king stroked her on the cheek, and said, "Child, if God pleaseth, it shall be so; but both you and I must submit to God's will, for you know whose hands I am in." Then turning to Sir Richard, Charles said, "Be sure, Dick, to tell my son all that I have said, and deliver these letters to my wife. Pray God bless her; and I hope I shall do well." Then, embracing Sir Richard, the king added, "Thou hast ever been an honest man, and I hope God will bless thee, and make thee a happy servant to my son, whom I have charged in my letter to continue his love and trust to you; and I do promise you, if I am ever restored to my dignity, I will bountifully reward you both for your services and sufferings." "Thus," says the noble Royalist lady, enthusiastically, "did we part from that glorious sun that within a few months after was extinguished, to the grief of all Christians who are not forsaken of their God."
No. 45 (east side) is the "Hole in the Wall" Tavern, kept early in the century by Jack Randal, alias "Nonpareil," a fighting man, whom Tom Moore visited, says Mr. Noble, to get materials for his "Tom Cribb's Memorial to Congress," "Randal's Diary," and other satirical poems. Hazlitt, when living in Southampton Buildings, describes going to this haunt of the fancy the night before the great fight between Neate, the Bristol butcher, and Hickman, the gas-man, to find out where the encounter was to take place, although Randal had once rather too forcibly expelled him for some trifling complaint about a chop. Hazlitt went down to the fight with Thurtell, the betting man, who afterwards murdered Mr. Weare, a gambler and bill-discounter of Lyon's Inn. In Byron's early days taverns like Randal's were frequented by all the men about town, who considered that to wear bird's-eye handkerchiefs and heavy-caped box coats was the height of manliness and fashion.
Chichester Rents, a sorry place now, preserves a memory of the site of the town-house of the Bishops of Chichester. It was originally built in a garden belonging to one John Herberton, granted the bishops by Henry III., who excepted it out of the charter of the Jew converts' house, now the Rolls Chapel.