previously arranged between him and the weak king, he preferred placing himself at the disposal of Henry, by whom he was banished for five years. Suffolk hugged himself too soon on his escape. Encouraged by the general detestation in which he was held, some of his rivals about the court most probably, (for it was never exactly known who,) caused him to be waylaid as he was crossing from Dover to Calais by a great ship of war, the captain of which greeted his appearance on his deck with the significant salutation "Welcome, traitor!" Three days after he was, as is well known, executed in a cock-boat by the ship's side. It is a startling illustration of a man's character, as well as of a time, to find no inquiry, much less punishment, following such an act. In this church another Parliament made itself noticeable by its daring to have a will of its own in opposition to that of Henry VIII., when that monarch, in 1524, demanded a subsidy of some eight hundred thousand pounds to carry on his unmeaning wars in France, but was obliged to content himself with a grant cut down into much more reasonable limits. Of this Parliament Sir Thomas More was speaker, and to his honour be it said, that although he was a great personal favourite with the court, and treated there with extraordinary marks of respect and affection, he acted with admirable firmness and dignity both towards his overbearing royal master, and that master's equally overbearing servant, the Chancellor Wolsey. In answer to the latter's application, More thought it would not "be amiss" to receive the Chancellor as he desired, who accordingly came into the house with his maces, poleaxes, cross, hat, and great seal, and with a retinue which filled every vacant part of the place. But when Wolsey, after explaining his business, remained silent, expecting the discussion and business to proceed, he was surprised to find the assemblage silent too. He addressed one of the members by name, who politely rose in acknowledgment, but sat down again without speaking: another member was addressed by Wolsey, but with no better success.

At last the great Chancellor became impatient; and looking upon him who was to be his still greater successor, said, "Masters, as I am sent here immediately from the King, it is not unreasonable to expect an answer: yet there is, without doubt, a surprising and most obstinate silence, unless indeed it may be the manner of your House to express your mind by your Speaker only." More immediately rose, and, with equal tact and courage, said the members were abashed at the sight of so great a personage, whose presence was sufficient to overwhelm the wisest and most learned men in the realm; but that that presence was neither expedient nor in accordance with the ancient liberties of the House. They were not bound to return any answer; and as to a reply from him (the Speaker) individually, it was impossible, as he could only act on the instructions from the House. And so Wolsey found himself necessitated to depart. Although much modified, the demands of the King were still so heavy that the people were dissatisfied. They were indeed greatly distressed, and no doubt thought the paying of any taxes to be but a dark piece of business: so, as the Parliament had commenced among the Black Friars, and ended among the Black Monks (at Westminster), they kept the whole affair in their recollection by the name of the Black Parliament.

The next event, in the order of time, is one of the deepest interest in the history

of the place. It was here that, on the 21st of June, 1529, Wolsey and his fellow Cardinal, Campeggio, appointed by the Pope to act with him in the matter of the proposed divorce of Henry and Catherine, sat in judgment, with the King on their right, and Catherine, accompanied by four bishops, on their left. When the King's name was called, he answered "Here!" but the Queen remained silent when hers was pronounced. Then the citation being repeated, the unhappy Queen, rising in great anguish, ran to her husband, and prostrating herself before him, said, in language that would have deterred any less cruel and sensual

nature from the infamous path he was pursuing, "Sir, I beseech you, for all the love that hath been between us, and for the love of God, let me have justice and right: take of me some pity and compassion, for I am a poor woman and a stranger, born out of your dominions. I have here no assured friend, much less impartial counsel; and I flee to you as to the head of justice within this realm. Alas! Sir, wherein have I offended you, or on what occasion given you dis

pleasure? Have I ever designed against your will and pleasure, that you should put me from you? I take God and all the world to witness that I have been to you a true, humble, and obedient wife, ever conformable to your will and pleasure," &c. At the conclusion of a most admirable, womanly, and yet dignified address, she rose, left the court, and never entered it again. She died at Kimbolton in 1536, heart-broken, but refusing to the last to renounce her rights and title of Queen. Even in that period, which so often awakes the injurer to a sense of the wrongs he has committed, and crowds into a few hours or days a world of unanticipated and then useless anguish, her royal husband remained consistent in cruelty, refusing her permission even to see her daughter once-but oncebefore she died. One of Catherine's judges had scarcely less reason than herself to remember that eventful day in the Black Friars. Wolsey, unable to prevail with Campeggio to give a decision at the time, seems to have been suspected by Anne Boleyn (then waiting the Queen's degradation to fill her place) to have acted but lukewarmly in the matter. Henry, too, had grown tired of his gorgeous Chancellor, and began to think of the value of his trappings. To sum up shortly the result in that same Black Friars, where he had endeavoured to bully one Parliament, the sentence of premunire was passed against him by another; and the man who had there sat in judgment upon Catherine, and been throughout the chief instrument in Henry's hands to doom that noble and virtuous lady to a lingering death, found that day's proceedings the immediate cause of his own downfall, and still speedier dissolution. The blow which Catherine's innocence, and moral fortitude and pious resignation, enabled her for a time to bear up against, killed Wolsey at once.

Such are the chief historical recollections of the great House of the Black Friars. There are some minor matters connected with its history, which are also deserving of notice, as bearing indirectly on the subject of our paper. The privileges before mentioned, it appears, produced continual heart-burnings between the city and the inhabitants of the favoured part, and violent quarrels were the consequences. We have an illustration of the feelings which prevailed in the circumstance that one of the priors having found himself obliged to pave the streets without the wall joining to the precinct, and a cage or small prison being afterwards there set up by the city, the prior pulled it down, saying, "Since the city forced me to pave the place, they shall set no cage there on my ground." At the dissolution, Bishop Fisher, who held it in commendam, resigned the house to the king. The revenues were valued at the very moderate sum of 100l. 15s. 5d. The prior's lodgings and the hall were granted to Sir Francis Bryan in 1547. We need scarcely add that these, with the church, and all the old privileges, have long since been swept away; although in 1586 a protracted, and for a time successful, struggle was maintained for the latter, by the inhabitants both of the Black and the White Friars (adjoining) in the courts of law in opposition to the city. Two or three passages of the statements made on this occasion will not be without interest for our readers. The city claimed the liberties, on the ground that the precincts were in London, offering, as a kind of proof that their right had been acknowledged, the circumstance that divers felons had been tried by the city for crimes committed within the precincts during the friars' time. Accordingly they now claimed from the crown all waifs, strays, felons' goods, amercements, escheats,

&c., the execution of all processes, the expulsion of all foreigners, the assize of bread, beer, ale, and wine, the wardmote-quest, and such other jurisdictions as they had in the rest of the city. The answer was very long and elaborate. With regard to the felons it was observed, that they were probably apprehended in London with the stolen things on them, and, therefore, were properly arraigned in the city; or that they were arraigned by the king's special commission, which would have been no infringement of the friars' rights. In another part of the document various statements were made of the rights and privileges granted to the house, and of the complete failure of the city at various times to encroach upon them thus, as to the first, it appears that in addition to the favours lavished upon their house by Edward I., the succeeding monarch made them free of all tenths, fifteenths, subsidies, quotas, taillages, or other burdens whatsoever granted, or to be granted, by the clergy or commons; and as to the latter, that besides numerous instances of successful resistance during the existence of the House, "Sir John Portynarie reported in his Life, that immediately after the dissolution the Mayor pretended a title to the liberties, but King Henry VIII., informed thereof, sent to him to desist from meddling with the liberties, saying, 'He was as well able to keep the liberties as the friars were.' And so the Mayor no further meddled, and Sir John Portynarie had the keys of the gates delivered to him, and a fee for keeping the same." Among the other arguments used were the loss to the crown-" Her Majesty may lose ten thousand pounds a day by lands within the said precincts, which may escheat to her, which, if the city will have it, is reason the city should give Her Majesty a good fine for it;" [this looks a little like spite :] and a bold answer to the allegations of the city as to the social state of the neighbourhood in question:-"They pretend to win favour to their cause, that they seek their liberties only for reformation of disorders, when gain is the mark they shoot at. But the Black Friars, for good order of government, may be a lanthorn to all the city, as shall be plainly proved, and is now inhabited by noblemen and gentlemen." The respectability here claimed for the neighbourhood of the Black Friars in 1586 does not appear to have been a mere counsellor's flourish, for among other residents about the period were Lord Herbert, son of the Earl of Worcester, to whose mansion, on the occasion of his marriage with an heiress of the house of Bedford in 1600, Queen Elizabeth came as a visitor. She was met at the water side by the bride, and carried to her house in a lectica* by six knights, where she dined.

Lord Cobham also, it appears, had a house in the neighbourhood, with whom her Majesty supped the same day, when a characteristic incident occurred, in connexion with Essex, then fast losing ground in the favour of his royal mistress. It appears from the Sydney Papers, transcribed in Pennant, that "there was a memorable mask of eight ladies, and a strange dance new invented. Mistress Fitton went to the Queen and wooed her dance. Her Majesty (the love of Essex rankling in her heart) asked what she was? Affection,' she said. • Affection!' said the Queen: Affection is false.' Yet her Majesty rose up and danced." The French ambassador also resided in Blackfriars during the succeeding reign, as we learn from the record of a terrible accident which happened

* Lectica, a kind of litter, the Roman bier.

in his house, and which seems to have sadly alarmed honest Stow with the idea that it was not merely a kind of judgment for our national sins, but a warning to be heedfully observed, lest still worse should follow. It appears that a celebrated Jesuit preacher, Father Drury, addressed a large audience in a room in the upper part of the house, and that during the sermon, the place being badly built or decayed, fell, and nearly a hundred persons perished.

6

In a

Seeing, then, that Blackfriars was a place of such repute in the beginning of the seventeenth century, one would hardly expect to find it by the latter part of the eighteenth so altered, that one of the recommendations of the new bridge should be the certainty of its working a purification of the district, and redeeming it from the state of poverty and degradation into which it had fallen. pamphlet On the Expediency, Utility, and Necessity of a New Bridge at or near Blackfriars, 1756,' the site of the approach on the Middlesex .shore is described as being occupied on both sides of the Fleet-ditch by a " body of miserable ruins in the back of Fleet Street, between that and Holborn on one side, and between the other and the Thames, and so again from each side of Ludgate.” And a builder examined before a committee of the House expressed his opinion that the houses and ground included were not worth five years' purchase. A question put to another witness examined on the same occasion seems to show the cause of this state of things. He was asked whether, in case the bridge was built as desired, the vicinity of the Fleet, Ludgate, Newgate, and Bridewell would not be an objection to the building better houses? and he owned in some parts it might. The Fleet and Newgate prisons are subjects too large to be touched upon here; the others we shall have occasion to mention in a subsequent part of our paper. We close this part of our subject, therefore, with a picturesque glimpse of the predecessor of Farringdon Street, at a time when the ditch yet reached up to the foot of Ludgate Hill; and beyond, the old Market extended through the centre of the present area to the bottom of Holborn. . In walking along the street in my youth," says Pennant, "on the side next to the prison, I have often been tempted by the question, 'Sir, will you please to walk in and be married?' Along this most lawless space was hung up the frequent sign of a male and female hand conjoined, with 'Marriages performed within' written beneath. A dirty fellow invited you in. The parson was seen walking before his shop; a squalid, profligate figure, clad in a tattered night-gown, with a fiery face, and ready to couple you for a dram of gin or roll of tobacco."* We have noticed the most thriving trade of the district, that of the "Fleet-parsons," in our last number.

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At the extremity of this street the City then determined to build its new bridge. On the other side of the river the aspect of affairs was still more favourable. In the maps of the reign of Elizabeth we perceive opposite the Black Friars, on the Surrey shore, one long but single line of houses, with handsomely laid-out gardens at the back, and here and there a few other scattered habitations, surrounded by extensive fields, with trees, &c. And although, no doubt, this as well as every other part in the immediate neighbourhood of the City had become much more populous a century later, when the Bridge was built, yet the amount of the purchase-money for houses and land, on the Surrey as compared with the Middlesex

Pennant's London, 3rd ed. P. 224.