Old and New London, Volume I / A Narrative of Its History, Its People, and Its Places

by Walter Thornbury

The George Dyer mentioned by Mr. Jay was not the author of "The Fleece," but that eccentric and amiable old scholar sketched by Charles Lamb in "The Essays of Elia." Dyer was a poet and an antiquary, and edited nearly all the 140 volumes of the Delphin Classics for Valpy. Alternately writer, Baptist minister, and reporter, he eventually settled down in the monastic solitude of Clifford's Inn to compose verses, annotate Greek plays, and write for the magazines. How the worthy, simple-hearted bookworm once walked straight from Lamb's parlour in Colebrooke Row into the New River, and was then fished out and restored with brandy-and-water, Lamb was never tired of telling. At the latter part of his life poor old Dyer became totally blind. He died in 1841.

The hall of Clifford's Inn is memorable as being the place where Sir Matthew Hale and seventeen other wise and patient judges sat, after the Great Fire of 1666, to adjudicate upon the claims of the landlords and tenants of burned houses, and prevent future lawsuits. The difficulty of discovering the old boundaries, under the mountains of ashes, must have been great; and forty thick folio volumes of decisions, now preserved in the British Museum, tell of many a legal headache in Clifford's Inn.

A very singular custom, and probably of great antiquity, prevails after the dinners at Clifford's Inn. The society is divided into two sections—the Principal and Aules, and the Junior or "Kentish Men." When the meal is over, the chairman of the Kentish Men, standing up at the Junior table, bows gravely to the Principal, takes from the hand of a servitor standing by four small rolls of bread, silently dashes them three times on the table, and then pushes them down to the further end of the board, from whence they are removed. Perfect silence is preserved during this mystic ceremony, which some antiquary who sees deeper into millstones than his brethren thinks typifies offerings to Ceres, who first taught mankind the use of laws and originated those peculiar ornaments of civilisation, their expounders, the lawyers.

In the hall is preserved an old oak folding case, containing the forty-seven rules of the institution, now almost defaced, and probably of the reign of Henry VIII. The hall casement contains armorial glass with the bearings of Baptist Hicks, Viscount Camden, &c.

Robert Pultock, the almost unknown author of that graceful story, "Peter Wilkins," from whose flying women Southey drew his poetical notion of the Glendoveer, or flying spirit, in his wild poem of "The Curse of Kehama," lived in this Inn, paced on its terrace, and mused in its garden. "'Peter Wilkins' is to my mind," says Coleridge (in his "Table Talk"), "a work of uncommon beauty, and yet Stothard's illustrations have added beauties to it. If it were not for a certain tendency to affectation, scarcely any praise could be too high for Stothard's designs. They give me great pleasure. I believe that 'Robinson Crusoe' and 'Peter Wilkins' could only have been written by islanders. No continentalist could have conceived either tale. Davis's story is an imitation of 'Peter Wilkins,' but there are many beautiful things in it, especially his finding his wife crouching by the fireside, she having, in his absence, plucked out all her feathers, to be like him! It would require a very peculiar genius to add another tale, ejusdem generis, to 'Peter Wilkins' and 'Robinson Crusoe.' I once projected such a thing, but the difficulty of a pre-occupied ground stopped me. Perhaps La Motte Fouqué might effect something; but I should fear that neither he nor any other German could entirely understand what may be called the 'desert island' feeling. I would try the marvellous line of 'Peter Wilkins,' if I attempted it, rather than the real fiction of 'Robinson Crusoe.'"

The name of the author of "Peter Wilkins" was discovered only a few years ago. In the year 1835 Mr. Nicol, the printer, sold by auction a number of books and manuscripts in his possession, which had formerly belonged to the well-known publisher, Dodsley; and in arranging them for sale, the original agreement for the sale of the manuscript of "Peter Wilkins," by the author, "Robert Pultock, of Clifford's Inn," to Dodsley, was discovered. From this document it appears that Mr. Pultock received twenty pounds, twelve copies of the work, and "the cuts of the first impression"—i.e., a set of proof impressions of the fanciful engravings that professed to illustrate the first edition of the work—as the price of the entire copyright. This curious document had been sold afterwards to John Wilkes, Esq., M.P.

Inns of Chancery, like Clifford's Inn, were originally law schools, to prepare students for the larger Inns of Court.

Fetter Lane did not derive its name from the manufacture of Newgate fetters. Stow, who died early in the reign of James I., calls it "Fewtor Lane," from the Norman-French word "fewtor" (idle person, loafer), perhaps analogous to the even less complimentary modern French word "foutre" (blackguard). Mr. Jesse, however, derives the word "fetter" from the Norman "defaytor" (defaulter), as if the lane had once been a sanctuary for skulking debtors. In either case the derivation is somewhat ignoble, but the inhabitants have long since lived it down. Stow says it was once a mere byway leading to gardens (quantum mutatus!) If men of the Bobadil and Pistol character ever did look over the garden-gates and puff their Trinidado in the faces of respectable passers-by, the lane at least regained its character later, when poets and philosophers condescended to live in it, and persons of considerable consequence rustled their silks and trailed their velvet along its narrow roadway.

During the Middle Ages Fetter Lane slumbered, but it woke up on the breaking out of the Civil War, and in 1643 became unpleasantly celebrated as the spot where Waller's plot disastrously terminated.

In the second year of the war between King and Parliament, the Royal successes at Bath, Bristol, and Cornwall, as well as the partial victory at Edgehill, had roused the moderate party and chilled many lukewarm adherents of the Puritans. The distrust of Pym and his friends soon broke out into a reactionary plot, or, more probably, two plots, in one or both of which Waller, the poet, was dangerously mixed up. The chief conspirators were Tomkins and Challoner, the former Waller's brother-in-law, a gentleman living in Holborn, near the end of Fetter Lane, and a secretary to the Commissioners of the Royal Revenues; the latter an eminent citizen, well known on 'Change. Many noblemen and Cavalier officers and gentlemen had also a whispering knowledge of the ticklish affair. The projects of these men, or of some of the more desperate, at least, were—(1) to secure the king's children; (2) to seize Mr. Pym, Colonel Hampden, and other members of Parliament specially hostile to the king; (3) to arrest the Puritan Lord Mayor, and all the sour-faced committee of the City Militia; (4) to capture the outworks, forts, magazines, and gates of the Tower and City, and to admit 3,000 Cavaliers sent from Oxford by a pre-arranged plan; (5) to resist all payments imposed by Parliament for support of the armies of the Earl of Essex. Unfortunately, just as the white ribbons were preparing to tie round the arms of the conspirators, to mark them on the night of action, a treacherous servant of Mr. Tomkins, of Holborn, overheard Waller's plans from behind a convenient arras, and disclosed them to the angry Parliament. In a cellar at Tomkins's the soldiers who rummaged it found a commission sent from the king by Lady Aubigny, whose husband had been recently killed at Edgehill.