in defence of the city: the gates of london and temple bar in the seventeenth century

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In Defence of the City: The Gates of London and Temple Bar in the Seventeenth CenturyAuthor(s): Emily MannSource: Architectural History, Vol. 49 (2006), pp. 75-99Published by: SAHGB Publications LimitedStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40033818 .

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In Defence of the City: The Gates of London and Temple Bar in the Seventeenth Century by EMILY MANN

INTRODUCTION

In the seventeenth century London was a walled city, as it had been since the Romans fortified it around 200 ad.1 The gates erected by the Romans on the most important routes in and out of the city were rebuilt on their ancient foundations in the medieval period, when posterns (smaller passageways) were added in the wall and a huge ditch was dug around the outside.2 By the seventeenth century, there were seven principal gates in the old wall: from east to west starting from the Tower, they were Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Moorgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgate, Newgate and Ludgate. On the bridge across the River Thames - the only point of entry to the City from the south - there were two more gates.3 The ditch, as John Stow recorded in his Survey of London (first published in 1598), was 'of late neglected and forced either to a very narrow, and the same a filthy channel, or altogether stopped up for gardens planted, and houses builded thereon'.4 This treatment of the ditch points to how the urban fabric had long since pushed through the gates and beyond the old walls; this area 'without', but still under the City's jurisdiction, was known as the Liberties. In Hollar's map of London in the later seventeenth century (Fig. 1), the walls and gates are a clearly visible feature defining the core of the City, which none the less spreads beyond them, in particular to the west. The limits of the Liberties were marked on main roads by 'bars', usually consisting of posts and chains, as at Holborn (to the north) or Whitechapel (to the east). Temple Bar, however, situated on Fleet Street to the west of Ludgate, had been made a gateway by the mid-fourteenth century,5 a reflection of its importance as the main point of transition between the Cities of London and Westminster. As such Temple Bar was considered one of the City gates; it was the eighth gate in the engraved plate that accompanied John Strype's version of Stow's Survey, published in 1720 (Fig. 2).

The gates in the seventeenth century have hitherto remained a little-studied feature of the cityscape. This neglect must be due partly to the fact that they no longer exist. All that remains in London to remind us of their historic presence are plaques and the names of the streets where they stood (Bishopsgate, Ludgate Hill, Newgate Street, for example), and it is hard now to imagine the visual and spatial impact they had. The gates have also been victims of a general aversion on the part of scholars to the civic

75



76 ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY 49: 2006

Fig. 1. Wenceslaus Hollar, map of the Cities of London and Westminster, Southwark and the suburbs, c. 1680 (Guildhall Library, City of London)

Fig. 2. The gates of London, from John Strype's Survey of London, 1720 {Institute of Historical Research, London)



THE GATES OF LONDON AND TEMPLE BAR 77

architecture of seventeenth-century London, as projects managed and funded by the City authorities rather than the Court or identifiable private citizens. John Summerson's colourful portrayal of the backwardness of the City in contrast to the sophisticated west end has long distorted perceptions of London's architectural history:

The City folk prided themselves on many things which were merely vulgar to the westerners. They liked fat cornices and enormous iron- work shop-signs, just as they liked starting the day with a draught of sack, over-eating, and pinching each others7 fat wives. The City contributed nothing to the art of the Stuarts and Georgians; it was content with the robust second-rate. And the only buildings there which had the stamp of architectural excellence were those which came under the authority of the men of Whitehall and St James's.6

Moreover, the spread of the City beyond the old walls and gates, and the development of means of warfare that limited their value as defences, has led to assumptions that they 'had only an administrative function by the Middle Ages',7 and were redundant by the seventeenth century.8

The aim of this article is to challenge such understandings. I will argue for the gates' continued relevance to the life and identity of the City both before and after the Great Fire in 1666, and suggest why the authorities were content with what Summerson dismissed as 'the robust second-rate'. I will then look at how and why Temple Bar retained special significance for the City, indicated by its survival when the gates in the walls were taken down and their stones sold off in the name of road improvements in the 1760s and 1770s.9 Temple Bar's eventual removal to a private estate in Hertfordshire in the late nineteenth century was the cause of considerable controversy.10 Aided by its survival in the English countryside and, in 2004, its return to the City of London as part of the Paternoster Square development near St Paul's Cathedral,11 it has been better remembered than the other gates. Nevertheless, scholarly attention has either favoured Inigo Jones and John Webb's unrealized designs of 1635-36,12 or focused on attributing the gate to Christopher Wren.13 1 will show that while Wren, as the King's Surveyor, was indeed consulted about the rebuilding of Temple Bar, the project did not come strictly under the authority of the men of Whitehall. The collaborative nature of the project, and the relationship of the gate's architectural elements to other buildings simultaneously being erected in the City, made it a distinctly civic edifice, albeit one with - literally and metaphorically - two sides.

'built for ornament as well as service' The story of the gates throughout the seventeenth century is one of rebuilding, repair and maintenance. Their care was delegated to the Committee for Letting the City Lands, which had numerous responsibilities relating to land and property owned by the City, but most success in defending the walls and gates from encroaching gardens and buildings on either side.14 The City records include many complaints about encroachments and resolutions to deal with them swiftly and strictly. On 24 November 1674, for example, the Court of Aldermen ordered a viewing of 'the building erecting by Mr Ay re before Aldgate [...] to see if the same will be anything prejudicial or a blemish to the said gate'.15 A week later, it was reported that George Ay re was building




Fig. 3. Wenceslaus Hollar, map showing the extent of the damage caused by the Great Fire of London, 1666 (Guildhall Library, City of London)

a storey higher than before, whereby 'the said gate (which hath formerly been erected by this City at a very great expense) will on that side be in great part clouded and obscured'. The court, 'conceiving that by the ancient custom of this City the gates thereof, which are built for ornament as well as service, ought to remain clear and free from all obstructions by building or otherwise', ordered that Mr Ayre desist from building higher than formerly 'at his peril'.16 This last entry is especially revealing. First, the City authorities were highly conscious of how their care of the gates - 'by ancient custom' - connected themselves with London's prestigious founders and past.17 Second, they took seriously the continuing dual function of the gates - 'built for ornament as well as service' - and considered it a duty to ensure that nothing hindered either their visual impact or practical purpose in the present.

Between 1620 and the Great Fire in 1666, frequent entries in the City records touch on the 'repair and making good' of the walls and gates, but the Fire, which reached well beyond them to the west (Fig. 3), resulted in a concentrated period of renewal for all the gates, damaged or not. While Newgate, Ludgate and Aldersgate suffered in the Fire, Cripplegate, Bishopsgate and Aldgate were left untouched, yet they were all repaired




in the aftermath. Moorgate and Temple Bar, which also escaped the flames, were entirely rebuilt in the early 1670s. In Londinium Redivivum (1666), John Evelyn had proposed that the rebuilt gates 'might be the subjects of handsome architecture, in [the] form of triumphal arches'.18 An important model for Evelyn was Paris,19 and it is possible that he and Charles II, to whom he submitted his proposals, knew of plans to replace the French capital's old gates with ornamental triumphal arches.20 The critic James Ralph, writing in 1734, echoed Evelyn: The gate of a city which is erected for ornament rather than use, ought to be in a stile of the ancient triumphal arches/21 On the whole, Ralph (and presumably Evelyn before him) was disappointed with what the City produced:

Newgate, considered as a prison, is a structure of more cost and beauty than was necessary, because the sumptuousness of the outside but aggravates the misery of the wretches within: but as a gate to such a city as London, it might have received considerable additions both of design and execution, and abundantly answer 'd the cost in the reputation of building.22

He even went so far as to state that: 'Fond as I am of gates, and indeed all sorts of buildings that may be made publick ornament, I can't help wishing that Ludgate was entirely demolished.'23 In his evident displeasure Ralph implicitly recognized that the gates were built not 'for ornament rather than use' but, as the post-Fire City authorities had made clear, for both. This dual function made the triumphal arch an inappropriate, or at least inadequate, model.24

The use the gates served was set in stone on the pedestal to the Monument, the 'Column on Fish Street Hill' erected in the 1670s as a memorial to the Great Fire. A Latin inscription on the north side records how the conflagration consumed 'eighty-nine churches, gates, the Guildhall, public edifices, hospitals, schools, libraries, a great number of blocks of buildings, 13,200 houses and 400 streets'.25 As John Moore has pointed out, the mention of the gates among such a variety of buildings was designed to 'locate the far-flung boundaries of the conflagration and to evince its enormity'.26 The idea of the City's historical defences being destroyed certainly conveys the uncontrollable force of the fire, which Thomas Vincent in his contemporary account portrayed as an 'enemy invading the city'.27 But the gates' inclusion so high on the list of fatalities, immediately after the churches and before the Guildhall, also emphasizes the seriousness of their loss and their civic importance at the time: comparable to buildings representing the spiritual and temporal government of the City. The Monument was designed as a memorial not just to what was lost in the Fire, but also to London's recovery, and an inscription on the south side of the pedestal records the passage of an Act of Parliament declaring that the

public works should be restored to greater beauty [...] that churches, and the cathedral of St Paul's should be rebuilt from their foundations, with all magnificence; that the bridges, gates and prisons should be new made, the sewers cleansed, the streets made straight and regular.

In their association with such necessities as bridges, prisons, sewers and streets, the gates are here identified as essential structures in maintaining the physical order and health of the City.



8o ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY 49: 2006

The prominent inclusion of the gates in the Monument's narrative of both the destruction and revival of London points to how they provided a semblance of continuity and stability through a period of dramatic change, and this would explain a wish to restore rather than remove or transform them.28 Yet the Monument also testifies that attitudes towards the gates constituted more than nostalgia or the vain hope of clinging to a seemingly more certain past, or even civic pride in a prestigious history. The gates were called upon to serve the present in a practical, as well as symbolic, way. Turbulence was endemic in seventeenth-century London.29 The movement of people in and out of the City could be monitored at the gates, which were constantly watched and shut every night.30 In this way they were used as an instrument of social control, yet they had more than a policing role. During the Civil War, the old wall, bulwarks and gates provided a second line of defence to the larger fortifications that were constructed in 1642-43. 31 The Venetian ambassador at the time pointed to how both sets of defences could be mobilized not only against external danger, but also against uprisings within; their form, he commented, 'betrays that they are not only for defence against the royal armies, but also against tumults of the citizens and, to ensure a prompt obedience on all occasions7.32

The gates, and London, survived the Civil War, but became the focus of a physical and symbolic attack by the Rump Parliament in the months leading to the restoration of King Charles II.33 In early February 1660, the Rump, riled by the threat of the freemen and householders of London that they would not submit to any laws and taxes unless imposed by a full and free Parliament, ordered Lord General Monck to destroy the posts, chains, gates and portcullises of the City34 In a letter of 9 February, Monck told Parliament that he had taken away the post and chains, but had refrained from taking down the gates and portcullises 'because it will in all likelihood exasperate the City'.35 Protestations from the Aldermen that 'the doing thereof would be of very ill consequence both to Parliament and City'36 seem only to have convinced Parliament that attacking the gates was the best way to insult and undermine the City.37 The magnitude of the event is suggested in a contemporary account:

The City gates [were] broke and cut a pieces, and the portcullises taken down and destroyed: which being done effectually at Cripplegate, Bishopsgate and Aldgate, where many thousand sad objects with no small terror beheld these unexpected ruins, the soldiers afterwards went to Aldersgate, Newgate, and some other places; but the work did not prove so feasible, for they being both of an extraordinary and impregnable strength, proved the more difficult; so that a longer time was required: However, they dismounted the gates from off the hinges, and with iron wedges and great hammers, rent and tore [into pieces] the portcullises.38 The action was 'well resented' by the citizens.39 Both the destruction and the City's

response contradict the twentieth-century view that these events were 'symbolic of the coming of a new age when walls and gates alike would cease to play any part in the life of the community'.40 The contemporary William Gough described how, immediately afterwards, it was feared 'all the cities and towns would be alarmed, believing, if that great City should be made a village, that all their franchises and privileges would be quickly subverted'.41 Writing in 1682, shortly after Charles II had stripped the City of its Charter under quo warranto proceedings, Gough equated the effects of the two events.42




Fig. 4. After Christopher Wren, plan for rebuilding the City of London after the Great Fire, engraving, c. 1666 (Guildhall Library, City of London)

Fig. 5. Richard Newcourt, first plan for rebuilding the City of London after the Great Fire, drawing, 1666 (Guildhall Library MS 3441. Guildhall Library, City of London)




Both had reduced the City to a village; without its gates, as without its Charter, London was no longer independent, no longer a City.

It was surely with the Rump's attack on the gates in mind that Hugh May, paymaster of the King's Works and one of Charles II's appointed commissioners for rebuilding London after the Fire, saw in the City's destruction an opportunity to reshape not just its physical fabric, but also its political power. He remarked that, with the exception of the Restoration itself, the fire was 'the greatest blessing that God had ever conferred' on the king because the gates and walls had been wrecked, and he should not let the citizens replace them 'to be a bit in his mouth and a bridle upon his neck'. Instead, the City would be left open for the king's troops to enter, 'there being no other way to govern that rude multitude but by force'.43 May's advice to the king strikingly illustrates not just the Court's antagonism towards the City during the Restoration, but how the gates remained highly visible markers of the City's independent power, and tools in the exercise of that power. May's comments apparently caused some amusement at Court, although not, it was reported, on the part of the king.44 May was indeed talking dangerously. By so angering and alienating the City, the Rump's attack on the gates played a role, however small, in Charles's restoration; the king knew he could not take the same risk. Sensitive to this, Christopher Wren, John Evelyn and Valentine Knight stopped short of doing away with the walls and gates in the ambitious (and unrealized) designs they submitted for rebuilding the City immediately after the Fire (Fig. 4).45 Even Richard Newcourt, who dared to propose the replacement of the City's old form with a rectangular grid (Fig. 5), none the less bounded it with walls and gates at regular intervals, and evoked the memory of the old City through the underlying 'Red Prickes [that] show the Walls of the Old City, & the Gates'.46

The Rump's attack and Hugh May's remarks indicate not merely the gates' significance as symbols of the City's independent strength, but their actual involvement in the negotiations of power between the City and outside forces: Parliament, towards the end of the Republic, and the royal Court before and after it. This was a role that applied in particular to Temple Bar.

TEMPLE BAR! 'TWIXT THE COURT AND THE CITY

Despite surviving the gates in the old walls when they were destroyed in the eighteenth century, Temple Bar (Figs 6, 7 and 8) could not escape the forces of urban modernization for ever. Yet it did not go without a fight. The debate over whether or not it should be pulled down rumbled on for years before it was removed in 1878, filling many column- inches and inspiring numerous images, both serious and satirical. The sheer amount of material printed on the subject points to the importance of the structure as a landmark, but the arguments made for and against its removal indicate the specific nature of the meanings Temple Bar had taken on and retained.47 In May 1834, the Morning Herald's correspondent wrote:

Now as to the pulling down of the ancient gateway called 'Temple Bar', we are quite of the opinion that it should not be done hastily, or without very substantial reasons [...] for this structure is well known and a proud memorial of civic rights and privileges.




Fig. 6. Temple Bar in 1877, shortly before its removal, viewed from the west (Guildhall Library, City of London)

It was an 'ancient, historical and architectural record of the civic independence of the Commonwealth of London', and had 'withstood for some time the cannon-shot of General Monck's army, and proved afterwards a bulwark against the spreading westward of the memorable fire of London'.48 This newspaper article suggests that, by the nineteenth century, Temple Bar's principal function was as a record and memorial, an aid to historical imagination. As it was observed in the Graphic in July 1870: 'It needs no great stretch of the imagination to realize that through Temple Bar passed all the great figures of English history, from Chaucer to Shakespeare, from Pepys to Doctor Johnson.'49 In the Morning Herald, however, Temple Bar was conceived not as a silent witness to events, but as an active player in them; it was a 'bulwark' against attack and thus a symbol of the City's strength and independence, roles consolidated during the upheavals (including war and fire) of the seventeenth century.

In this way, Temple Bar was comparable to the gates in the old walls, but it also constituted the main point of access between two distinct spheres of power, the City and the Crown. As Edward Hatton had observed in his New View of London in 1708: 'At this gate the Freedom of London and Liberty of Westminster are separated, and the governments within, much different from that without.'50 The gate played a pivotal role in movements and relations between the two realms. The Morning Herald recorded how 'Temple Bar is still formally closed, on certain occasions, against the official agents of the court, and it is reopened only by the special order of the Lord Mayor'.51 This ritual




Fig. 7. Temple Bar in Paternoster Square, London, 2006 (originally the west side)

Fig. 8. Temple Bar in Paternoster Square, London, 2006 (originally the east side)




was conducted in particular for the state entry of the monarch, which added the ceremony of the mayor handing the civic keys and sword to the king or queen, who then handed them back. Temple Bar was thus popularly associated with the recognition of authority and negotiation of power, in effect brokering the peace between the forces on either side. This was unequivocally expressed in a poem written in response to attempts to remove the gate in 1788:

If that Gate is pulled down, 'twixt the Court and the City, You'll blend in one mass, prudent, worthless and witty. If your league cit and lordling, as brother and brother, YouTl break order's chain, and theyTl war with each other. Like the Great Wall of China, it keeps out the Tartars, From making irruptions, where industry barters. Like Sumson's Wild Foxes, theyTl fire your houses, And madden your spinsters, and cousin your spouses. They'll destroy in one sweep, both the Mart and the Forum. Which your fathers held dear, and their fathers before them.52

By the mid-nineteenth century, as Lynda Nead has argued, Temple Bar stood 'as a symbol of the problems facing the reform and modernization of the metropolis and of the persistent struggles for authority between the Corporation of London, the Metropolitan Board of Works and central government'.53 My concern in the rest of this article is how the identity of Temple Bar as a 'testament to the divisions and conflicting interests within the capital754 was embedded in its demolition and rebuilding in 1669-72.

Thomas Markus has sought to understand the meaning of buildings by considering the way relations are established and shaped in and through them, and this is an appropriate approach to reading Temple Bar.55 In the seventeenth (as in the nineteenth) century, the treatment of Temple Bar was about more than modernizing London's thoroughfares; it signalled an attempt to alter not just spatial, but also political, relations between different centres of power. The resulting tensions are traceable in three aspects of Temple Bar: first, the circumstances that led to it being rebuilt, especially the dynamics of the joint involvement of the City and Court; second, its appearance as rebuilt; and third, the way in which it was involved in the 'theatre of street polities' in the unstable years between its completion and the coronation of William and Mary in 1689.56

'It is time that the good folks in the City were plainly told that the question of Temple Bar concerns not them alone, but is of equal importance to the inhabitants of Westminster.'57 So urged the Daily Telegraph in 1876, supporting the removal of the gateway, but this could almost have been written in the 1660s, when the royal establishment put consistent pressure on the City to rebuild Temple Bar, likewise in the name of road improvements.58 In the early summer of 1668, the king's Commissioners for the Streets made the latest in a series of proposals to demolish the existing Temple Bar and create a more open passageway. In June, the Aldermen reported their 'readiness' for the Commissioners to visit the Guildhall on Tuesday or Thursday of the following week in order to discuss the matter.59 The City's resistance to the Court's intervention over the gate is palpable. While communicating that they were prepared to talk, the Aldermen ensured this was on their own territory, at a time convenient with




Fig. 9. John Bushnell, statue of Elizabeth I on the east side of Temple Bar

Fig. 10. John Bushnell, statue of James I on the east side of Temple Bar

them, and the discussion (if it happened at all) resulted in no action by the City. In July the following year, it was reported to the Aldermen that the mayor had been sent for to appear before the king, who asked him why Temple Bar still had not been taken down.60 The mayor had answered that the City's finances were stretched following the Fire and that the £1,500 arranged by the king to pay for the work would not be enough. The Aldermen heard that the king 'did nonetheless insist upon the taking down of the said Bar and buildings' and signified 'his pleasure several times to that purpose'. He urged the City to accept the money, and declared that, when it had been spent, he would 'take care they should be further supplied [...] for carrying on and finishing that work'. The Aldermen had little choice but to accept, 'in obedience to his Majesty's pleasure'. The mayor ordered the demolition of the old gate and the rebuilding began.

Between 1670 and 1672, payments were made in quick succession to the sculptor John Bushnell and the masons Joshua Marshall and Thomas Knight,61 indicating that Bushnell's statues (Figs 9-12) of Queen Elizabeth I (also identified in contemporary accounts as James's wife, Queen Anne)62, James I, Charles I and Charles II formed an integral part of the gate's design. The project was overseen by the City Lands




Fig. 11. John Bushnell, statue of Charles I on the west side of Temple Bar

Fig. 12. John Bushnell, statue of Charles II on the west side of Temple Bar

Committee, but in January 1670 a special committee was appointed by the Court of Common Council 'for managing the rebuilding of Temple Bar and any other public edifices of the City, for which no committee are particularly appointed'.63 While the City - through this committee and its Surveyor Robert Hooke - seems to have been ultimately in charge of the project, the King's Surveyor, Christopher Wren, was consulted over the bills.64 The building's execution and, this would suggest, also its design were the result of collaboration between men representing the City and the Court.65 The employment of both Thomas Knight (City Mason) and Joshua Marshall (Crown Mason) neatly expresses the collaborative nature of this joint endeavour.

Charles II's personal intervention in the rebuilding of Temple Bar is unlikely to have been merely in the interest of teamwork, however, or of the free and stately flow of traffic from Westminster into London. Rather, it should be seen in the context of the need, in the years following his restoration, to legitimize his kingship and, in particular, to assert control in the power relations between the Crown and London, which had played a crucial, oppositional role in the Civil War and regicide. As Thomas Hobbes wrote: 'But for the City, the Parliament never could have made the war, nor the Rump




ever murdered the King/66 Two major problems facing Charles II - in what Jonathan Sawday has termed a 'symbolic crisis of representation7 - were, first, the 'historical chasm which had opened up between the January of 1649 and the May of 1660' and the unprecedented nature of the Restoration; and, second, the historical fact and continued threat of opposition to the monarchy now that an alternative model of authority had been experienced.67 In his article on 're-writing a revolution', Sawday develops Christopher Hill's argument that there is 'plenty of contemporary evidence to throw doubt on the universality and spontaneity of rejoicing at Charles IFs return',68 arguing that we should not take at face value the civic festivities and displays of allegiance. As Tim Harris has highlighted, even if the restoration of the Stuarts was genuinely popular, 'this popularity does not appear to have lasted long'; disillusionment soon followed the restoration.69 This disillusionment was perhaps felt strongest in London, which had played a central role in the Restoration and where life in general (not just political) was made especially unhealthy by plague and fire in 1665-66. It is possible to read Charles's commitment to the rebuilding of Temple Bar as a challenge to both the problems mentioned above: on the one hand, the 'chasm' that had been created in the history of the monarchy; and, on the other, London's historical role in bringing about that disruption and continued role as an independent force, a place where the new king could become as unpopular as the last.

In 1636, during the reign of Charles I, Inigo Jones was commissioned to design a new Temple Bar.70 He and John Webb worked on designs that would have transformed the old structure into a triumphal arch on the model of the Roman Arches of Constantine and Septimus Severus, but Temple Bar was not rebuilt under Charles I.71 By realizing a project planned in the reign of his father, Charles II was able to reintegrate past and present in an act almost of defiance: one that not only claimed a direct link to his father's reign, but also satisfied one of his dead father's wishes, and moreover did so on the doorstep of those who had helped bring about his execution. The dynastic display of statues on each side of the new gate served visually to close up the 'chasm' between Charles II and his royal ancestors. The pairing of father and son in particular (Fig. 13) - which was repeated in the statues (also by Bushnell) either side of the main entrance to the Royal Exchange (Fig. 14) - constructed an image of continuity that constituted an attempt to obliterate from memory the man and events that had come between the two Charleses, and thereby to legitimize the new king's authority. It is hard to read the Temple Bar statues as a spontaneous gesture of allegiance or gratitude by the City - it had little choice on the matter given the king's involvement in the project and a decision by Parliament that royal statues should be placed on either side.72

Charles IFs insistence that Temple Bar be rebuilt and his assurances over funds could be interpreted as a gesture of forgiveness and generosity towards the City, an attempt both to cleanse relations between them of the memory of their disloyalty and, by renewing a marker of the City's independence, to reaffirm its right to the same. Nevertheless, while Hugh May apparently went too far in advising the king to do away with the City's gates and thereby strip it of its independence, Charles's intervention over Temple Bar seems to have constituted a bid to control the extent to which the gate could symbolize that independence. His involvement could be considered an attempt




Fig. 13. Detail of the west side of Temple Bar

to turn Temple Bar into a permanent expression, from the king's perspective, of the meaning of the ritual of state entry: marking the City's independence at the same time as reminding that it was not unconditional, but bestowed by, and entirely dependent on, the benevolent authority of the king.73 The actual world of politics may have been in a state of flux and uncertainty, but in Temple Bar an attempt was made to set the relations between Crown and City in stone. In effect, through Temple Bar, Charles II bound the City into building a monument acknowledging royal power. This was particularly useful for the king at a time when monarchical ostentation had the potential to be more politically damaging than ever.

Charles II thus succeeded in forcing the City to rebuild Temple Bar where his father had apparently failed, perhaps indeed creating, as Kerry Downes has suggested, 'a more discreet substitute for the "Triumphal Arch to the Founder of the New City"' that Wren had proposed for Ludgate following the Great Fire.74 The rebuilt arch was, however, strikingly different from the triumphal arches designed by Jones and Webb thirty years before (see Christine Stevenson's article in the present volume, Fig. 11), a difference that indicates why those projects had not been executed. While Temple Bar was also distinct from the gates in the old walls, its features relate to other buildings constructed in the City before and after the Fire. The statues of the four monarchs stand not on pedestals on top of the arch, as they do in the designs by Jones and Webb, but in niches framed by pilasters: a motif used on the south front and interior courtyard of the Royal Exchange (Fig. 14), 75 and over the entrances to other civic structures such as the Mercers' Hall, as well as on the gates in the old walls (Fig. 2). In




Fig. 14. Robert White, the Royal Exchange (south front), engraving, 16 yi (Guildhall Library, City of London)

his case for attributing Temple Bar's design to Wren, Downes relates the windows in the centre of the east and west faces of the gate to those in the aisles of St Paul's at the 'Definitive' stage (1675), yet they also seem to relate closely to window surrounds, and even tomb sculptures, carved by City masons in the 1660s and 1670s.76 Scrolls almost identical to Temple Bar's likewise embellished fagades across the City, for example at St Paul's School, as did the curved pediment, like those on Moorgate, Bethlem and the Royal Exchange. In fact, the arrangement of the upper half of Temple Bar (Fig. 15) bears a striking resemblance to that which crowned the Guildhall's fagade following the Fire (Figs 16 and 17); each consisted of a central section containing royal imagery (statues on Temple Bar, the king's arms on the Guildhall) surmounted by a curved pediment and buttressed by scrolls and, either side of these, the City's heraldic dragons.77 The use of these elements and their arrangement mark Temple Bar as a civic project, and counterbalance the authority asserted by the royal statues. The gate thus expresses a tension between the claims and demands of the two principal players in its rebuilding, City and Court.




Fig. 15. Detail of the east side of Temple Bar

Fig. 16. Detail of the Guildhall, from John Strype's Survey of London, 1720 (Institute of Historical Research, London)




Fig. 17. The Guildhall, from John Strype's Survey of London, 1720 (Institute of Historical Research, London)

The royal statues, while dominating both sides of the gate, may themselves express such a tension. Katharine Gibson noted the 'curious combination' of Charles II dressed like a Roman victor, but wearing a periwig and the Garter, seen in Bushnell's statue (Fig. 12). Moreover, the male monarchs on either side appear rather different from each other; for instance, James Fs Tudor outfit (Fig. 10) sharply contrasts with Charles Fs billowing drapery (Fig. 11).78 The dualism of the gate is further defined by the use of heraldry: while the king's supporters framed the west side (Fig. 13), the City's supporters presided over the east (Fig. 15); and while the royal arms loomed above the central archway to the west, the corporation's dominated the east. The mayoral inscription on the east fagade - 'Erected in the year 1670, Sir Samuel Starling Mayor; continued in the Year 1671, Sir Richard Ford Lord Mayor; and finished in the Year 1672, Sir George Waterman Lord Mayor' - swayed the balance by claiming Temple Bar as the product of the successive rule of the City's most powerful men.79

The identity of the female statue on the east side (Fig. 9) was soon exploited by the citizens of London and played against the statues on the west. In the years of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis that followed, Temple Bar became the focus of anti- Catholic demonstrations. The favourite date for these demonstrations was 17 November, the day on which the Popish Plotters had apparently testified and, conveniently, the day the Protestant Queen Elizabeth had ascended to the throne. According to one report, an incredible 200,000 witnessed the burning of a papal effigy on the City side of the gate on 17 November 1679,80 which was recorded in print. A




broadsheet describes how a shield bearing the inscription 'The Protestant Religion, Magna Charta' was affixed to the female statue, which was identified as Queen Elizabeth.81 The attention paid to the Tudor queen was not to ignore the Stuart kings, as Nicola Smith has suggested,82 but rather to distinguish between her character as a Protestant saviour and the perceived threat of the Stuart monarchs to the Protestant faith. The distinction being drawn between the statues - Elizabeth on one side, the two Charleses on the other - applied more generally to the two realms either side of Temple Bar, the City side being, as Samuel Rolle described it, a 'great bulwark and fortress of Protestant interest'.83 If this were not the case, one would expect the statue of Elizabeth on the west side of Ludgate to have played a similar role in the processions, but it did not. It is from these events in particular that Temple Bar - not just the statue of Elizabeth, as Smith has argued84 - gained meaning as a protector of the Protestant faith, so that the author of its Last Dying Speech and Declaration, printed in 1877, contrived to make it urge Londoners: 'Preserve your ancient Protestant Liberties; do not [...] be word-pleaded out of them by priests/85

The function of the City side of Temple Bar as a stage from which Londoners sent a message to the distinct powers represented by the other side, as well as the gate's association with the protection of the Protestant religion, are confirmed by the way in which, in December 1688 and 1689, on the day and first anniversary of William and Mary's arrival in the capital, Londoners burnt effigies of hated characters from the previous reigns at Temple Bar, and ended the evening with cheers for the new sovereigns.86

CONCLUSION

My first aim in this article was to provide evidence of the continued relevance of the gates to the life and identity of London in the seventeenth century. It is striking that two decades after Louis XIV had authorized the abandonment of Paris's new but obsolete defensive walls and their transformation into tree-lined promenades, and at the time when the French city's old gates were being replaced by ornamental triumphal arches (for example, the Porte St Denis of 1672-73 and Porte St Martin of 1674-75), the City of London reaffirmed the existence, and significance, of its own walls and gates through rebuilding and repair.87 London's peculiar political, social and religious history in the seventeenth century, which I have drawn upon here, demanded active service from the gates that went beyond, even conflicted with, their ornamental and ceremonial roles (and Paris, associated with a religious and political system feared and hated by Londoners during the period, was an example to be avoided rather than followed). Such considerations give new meaning to what Summerson classed as 'the robust second-rate'.

My second aim was to explain Temple Bar's special significance for the City. Its survival long after the demolition of all the other gates, and the solitary years it spent in the countryside before its return to London in 2004, have encouraged a tendency to treat Temple Bar as an isolated monument. I have shown, I hope, that it is better understood against the backdrop of the gates in the old walls - against which it was actually built. Rather than London and Westminster becoming one entity after the Great




Fire, the preservation and restoration of gates and walls served to maintain a distinction between the City and the realm of the royal Court, and Parliament, to the west. This distinction was sharpest at Temple Bar, which was itself (not just the ceremonies enacted through it) a vehicle for dialogue between the two spheres of power.88

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article is an edited version of work commended by the judges of the Hawksmoor Essay Medal in 2003. It derives from an MA Dissertation undertaken at the Courtauld Institute of Art the same year, which was made possible by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now Council). I am immensely grateful to Christine Stevenson for her continuing advice and encouragement, and to Judi Loach for her considerable patience. I would also like to acknowledge the kind hospitality and help of staff at the Guildhall Library (in particular Jeremy Smith) and the Institute of Historical Research, London. Finally I must thank Richard Johns, my debts to whom are too numerous to mention.

PHOTOGRAPHS

Figs 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 14: by kind permission of the Guildhall Library, City of London. Figs 2, 16, 17: by kind permission of the Institute of Historical Research, London. Figs 7, 8, 9, 10, ii, 12, 13, 15: Richard Johns.

NOTES

1 By London, I mean the City of London, the area under the jurisdiction of the City authorities. Throughout this article, I use 'City' to refer to this area in the geographical and /or political sense. 2 Ralph Merrifield, The Roman City of London (London, 1965), pp. 101-11, 316-20; John Schofield, The Building of London from the Conquest to the Great Fire (London, 1984), p. 129. 3 Of the two gates, Bridgegate functioned as the official entrance to the City from the south. It appears to have undergone no major changes in the seventeenth century and seems to have been considered more as part of the bridge than one of the principal gates; the engraved plate in John Strype's 1720 edition of John Stow's Survey of London (London, 1598) does not include it with the other gates. 4 Stow, A Survey of London, p. 17. 'To what danger of the City/ Stow went on, 'I leave to wiser consideration, and can but wish that reformation might be had.' 5 Hugh Wontner, 'The Gates of the City: A Method of Defence', Transactions of the Guildhall Historical Association, 5 (1982), pp. 75-82 (p. 80). 6 John Summerson, Georgian London (London, 1988), p. 40. The only mention of the gates in Summerson's Architecture in Britain 1530-1830, 9th edn (New Haven and London, 1993), p. 188, is that Ludgate and Newgate were rebuilt after the Fire, and then they are treated as prisons rather than gateways. 7 Spiro Kostof, The City Assembled: The Elements of Urban Form Through History (London, 1992), p. 26. 8 Schofield, The Building of London, p. 129, claims that the City's defences became 'increasingly irrelevant' in the sixteenth century. 9 The Gentleman's Magazine reported in 1760 that 'the materials of the three following City gates were sold before the Committee of City Lands to Mr Blagden, a carpenter in Coleman Street: viz, Aldgate for £177. 10s, Cripplegate for £91, and Ludgate for £148. [...] The statue of Queen Elizabeth on the west side [of Ludgate] is purchased by Alderman Gosling, in order to be set up near St Dunstan's Church' (The Gentleman's Magazine Library: Being a Classified Collection of the Chief Contents of the Gentleman's Magazine from 1731 to 1868, ed. George Laurence Gomme, English Topography part XV: London, 1 (London, 1904), p. 201). The said statue is now to be found over the entrance to the parochial schools adjacent to St Dunstan's in Fleet Street, London, and the sculptures of King Lud and his sons from the east side of Ludgate are located in the porch there. According




to Charles Welch, Modern History of the City of London: a Record of Municipal and Social Progress from 1760 to the Present Day (London, 1896), p. 3, Moorgate was sold for £166 and Aldersgate for £91. Newgate was cleared away between 1776 and 1781 (R. B. Pugh, 'A Gaol's Changing Face: Newgate Prison', Country Life, 4 October 1973, p. 1016), and at least two of its statues may still exist (Nicola Smith, The Ludgate Statues', The Sculpture journal, 3 (1999), p. 24, n. 1). 10 A condition of Temple Bar's removal in 1878 was that the stones be numbered and stored in the hope that it would be re-erected elsewhere in London. In 1880, the stones were sold to Sir Henry Bruce Meux, who reconstructed Temple Bar as the entrance to his Hertfordshire estate, Theobalds Park. 11 Temple Bar's return to the City was agreed at a meeting of the Court of Common Council in December 2001 and was completed in November 2004. The process of dismantling, restoration and reconstruction cost more than £3 million, and was funded by the City of London along with donations from the Temple Bar Trust and several livery companies. The stonework needed considerable conservation and restoration work, which was carried out by the Cathedral Works Organization. The four original royal statues have been restored and returned to their niches, while new statues depicting the royal and City supporters and associated coats of arms in cartouches were carved by Tim Crawley of Fairhaven at Anglesey Abbey. These replace the original statues that were lost after Temple Bar was removed from Fleet Street in the nineteenth century. 12 See John Peacock and Christy Anderson, Tnigo Jones, John Webb and Temple Bar', Architectural History, 44 (2001), pp. 29-38; John Harris and Gordon Higgott, Inigo Jones: Complete Architectural Drawings (London, 1989), pp. 251-53; and Vaughan Hart, Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts (London, 1994), pp. 169-72. 13 T. C. Noble, Memorials of Temple Bar (London, 1869) put forward as the strongest evidence that Wren designed Temple Bar a document from the British Library, Lansdowne MS 698, fols 136-45. This contains a list of Wren's works, handwritten by his son in 1720 (before Wren's death), which includes Temple Bar. However, as Howard Colvin pointed out in his Biographical Dictionary of English Architects, 1600-1840 (London, 1954), p. 704, this list of works is 'imperfect and inaccurate', and a number of scholars have preferred to 'suspend judgement' (T. F. Reddaway, The Rebuilding of London after the Great Fire (London, 1951), p. 216, n. 1). The most comprehensive case for considering the traditional attribution to Wren is provided by Kerry Downes, The Architecture of Wren (London, 1982), p. 124, n. 143. 1 am grateful to Anthony Geraghty for supplying me with copies of Summerson's handwritten notes on the question of attribution. 14 Neal R. Shipley, 'The City Lands Committee, 1592-1642', Guildhall Studies in London History, 2:4 (1977), pp. 161-78 (p. 170). The records of the City Lands Committee are held at the London Metropolitan Archives, along with the Repertories of the Court of Aldermen and the Journals of the Court of Common Council (henceforth abbreviated to Repertory and Journal). These are vital sources for study of the gates in the seventeenth century, as is Guildhall Library MS 184/4: a copy of accounts of disbursements by the Chamberlain of London for labour and materials in connexion with the restoration and reconstruction of various buildings and public works after the Great Fire, 1667-76. 15 Repertory 80, fol. 23. 16 Repertory 80, fol. 37. 17 For more on how London's links with its ancient Roman past were reinforced in the seventeenth century, particularly in relation to the gates and walls, see Emily Mann, The Gates of London in the Seventeenth Century' (unpublished MA dissertation, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 2003), pp. 22-26. 18 John Evelyn: London Revived - Consideration for its Rebuilding in 1666, ed. E. S. De Beer (Oxford, 1938), p. 50. 19 See Judith Hook, The Baroque Age in England (London, 1976), p. 71, and John Evelyn, ed. De Beer, pp. 16, 22-23. 20 The Porte St Denis was built in 1672-73 and Porte St Martin in 1674-75. Evelyn and Charles II are likely to have known the Livre d 'architecture compiled by Alessandro Francini, Louis XIV s Florentine engineer, and published in Paris in 1631, which contained forty plates of gates and triumphal arches. 21 James Ralph, A Critical Review of the Publick Buildings, Statues and Ornaments in, and about London and Westminster, facsimile of 1734 London edn (Farnborough, 1971), p. 16. 22 Ibid., p. 16. 23 Ibid., p. 23. 24 Nicola Smith, The Royal Image and the English People (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 96-109, has drawn attention to the relationship between the gates and the temporary arches erected for state ceremonies in sixteenth- and

seventeenth-century London, particularly in her analysis of the rebuilding of Aldgate (1607-09) and




Aldersgate (1617) in response to the coronation arches of James I, but also more generally in her emphasis on the sculpted decoration and ceremonial role of the gates. Having considered the gates as buildings, more than just sites for display, I have found the relationship between the permanent gates and temporary arches to be one of difference rather than resemblance. This can certainly be inferred from Howard Colvin, 'Pompous Entries and English Architecture', in Essays in English Architectural History (New Haven and London, 1999), pp. 67-93. In his study of how the ephemeral character of these arches made them 'important vehicles for new architectural ideas', Colvin considered the effect of this 'advertisement [...] to classical architecture in the streets of London' on country houses many miles from the City but made no connexion with the gates, even though they were decorated on ceremonial occasions and some were included in the processional routes. The gates that were rebuilt in a manner closest to triumphal arches were Moorgate, whose appearance was directly related to Bethlem Hospital beside it (which relationship I intend to explore in a future study), and Temple Bar, whose design I will consider in the second part of this article. For more on triumphal arches in the City, see Christine Stevenson's article in the present volume. 25 For the Latin inscriptions and the translations I have used here, as well as a description of and bibliography for the Monument, see Philip Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London (Liverpool, 2003), pp. 260-68. 26 J. E. Moore, 'The Monument, or, Christopher Wren's Roman Accent', Art Bulletin, 80:3 (1998), pp. 499-533 (p. 509). 27 Thomas Vincent, God's Terrible Voice in the City (1667), quoted in Gustav Milne, The Great Fire of London (London, 1986), p. 29. 28 Specific acts of salvage and reuse of civic sculptures after the Fire - on the City sides of Newgate and Ludgate, on the entrance to Guildhall and at the Royal Exchange - suggest a general desire to establish links between post- and pre-Fire London. At Newgate, the statues of Justice, Mercy and Truth seem to have been reused (Pugh, 'A Gaol's Changing Face', pp. 1014-15), and at Ludgate, King Lud and his sons were retained (Smith, 'The Ludgate Statues'). The Guildhall sculptures in particular were celebrated for having 'lived' the Fire (in an inscription to an anonymous engraving, c. 1720, in the Guildhall Library), and many poems on the subject of the Great Fire highlight the sole survival of the statue of Thomas Gresham at the Royal Exchange (see R. A. Aubin (ed.), London in Flames, London in Glory: poems on the rebuilding of London, 1666-1709 (New Brunswick, 1943). 29 See Ian Roy, "This Proud Unthankefull City": A Cavalier View of London in the Civil War', in London and the Civil War, ed. Stephen Porter (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 149-74 (p- X49)- 30 The watch and curfew were observed well into the eighteenth century. 31 Victor Smith and Peter Kelsey, 'The Lines of Communication', in London and the Civil War, ed. Porter, pp. 117-48 (p. 122). 32 Smith and Kelsey, 'The Lines of Communication', p. 118. 33 For analysis of the events leading to the Restoration, see Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration Until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 36-52, and J. R. Jones, Country and Court: England 1658-1714 (London, 1978), ch. 6, pp. 113-39. 34 The main sources for these events are City Tract 48, The Declaration and Speech of His Excellency the Lord General Monck (London, 1660), held in the Bromhead Library at the University of London Library; A Letter of His Excellencie The Lord General Monck, to the Speaker of the Parliament from Guildhall, London [Broadside] (London, 1660), held in the Guildhall Library; and Repertory 67 and Journal 41. The publication of Monck's letter and Parliament's response as a broadside, and the 'special courts' of Aldermen called in quick succession and over a weekend, indicate the seriousness of the events. 35 A Letter of His Excellencie The Lord General Monck, to the Speaker of the Parliament (see previous note). 36 Repertory 67, fols 42-42R 37 The Rump's actions apparently had some precedent. Henry Johnson, Temple Bar and State Pageants: an Historical Record of State Processions to the City of London, and of the Quaint Ceremonies Connected therewith (London, 1897), p. 7, described how kings 'on several occasions [...] swept away the posts and chains when the "free and independent" citizens asserted their opinions in too open and practical a manner. After the battle of Evesham, for instance, the posts and chains were packed off to the Tower because the Londoners sided with the English barons.' 38 City Tract 48, pp. 6-7. 39 Ibid., p. 6. 40 W. G. Bell, F. Cottrill and C. Spon, London Wall Through Eighteen Centuries: A History of the Ancient Town




Wall of the City of London with a Survey of the Existing Remains (London, 1937), p. 103. W. G., The Faithful Annalist: or The Epitome of the English History [...] (London, 1666) claimed in the title to give 'a true account of the affairs of this nation, from the building of the Tower of London, in the days of William the Conqueror, to the throwing down the gates of the said City, by the command of the Parliament', which suggests something of the national and historical significance attributed to the event. Also, the City was quick to assess the dangers to which 'the City is exposed by the destruction of their gates and portcullises', and in a matter of weeks the Common Council authorized the Chamberlain to 'borrow such moneys as are needful for the present defrayings of the charges of setting up and making good the gates, portcullises, posts and chains of this City until the same be satisfied by the state' (Journal 41, fol. 223, 7 March 1660). 41 William Gough, Londinum Triumphans, or an Historical Account of the Grand Influence the Actions of the City of London have had upon the Affairs of the Nation for many Ages past (London, 1682), p. 359. 42 For the reasons for and ramifications of the removal of the City's Charter, see Jennifer Levin, The Charter Controversy in the City of London, 1660-1688, and its Consequences (London, 1969). 43 Quoted in Stephen Porter, The Great Fire of London (Stroud, 1996), pp. 87-88. At the beginning of the century, Stow added to his Survey of London a short tract which, in defending the City, praised its role in acting as a bridle against tyranny (A Survey of London by John Stow, Reprinted from the text of 1603, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (Oxford, 1908), 11, pp. 198-99). The gates and walls, as Hugh May's remarks make clear, were instrumental in the City's role as such a bridle in the seventeenth century. 44 Porter, The Great Fire of London, p. 88. 45 Cynthia Wall, The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (Cambridge, 1998), p. 47. 46 Newcourt included this explanation on his first plan (Guildhall Library, MS 3441) of three, all held at the Guildhall Library along with a written description of his proposals. His positioning of certain of the old gates on new roads in the grid (for example, Aldgate, Cripplegate, Newgate and Ludgate) seems to suggest they could be retained as free-standing structures. 47 The Noble Collection in the Guildhall Library contains a large number of images and newspaper cuttings on the subject of Temple Bar. 48 Morning Herald, 19 May 1834: newspaper cutting, Noble Collection, Guildhall Library. 49 From the Graphic, 23 July 1870, quoted in Temple Bar Trust, The Return of Temple Bar to the City (London, 2000), p. 9. 50 Edward Hatton, A New View of London; or, an Ample Account of that City, 2 vols (London, 1708), 1, p. ix. 51 Morning Herald, 19 May 1834. 52 Anthony Pasquin (alias John Edwin, real name John Williams), The Metropolitan Prophecy, 1788, quoted by Noble, Memorials of Temple Bar, pp. 33-34. 53 Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven and London, 2000), p. 203. 54 Ibid., p. 206. 55 Thomas A. Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types (London, 1993), p. xx. 56 For the 'theatre of street polities', see Nicholas Rogers, quoted in Gary S. De Krey, A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the First Age of Party, 1688-1715 (Oxford, 1985), p. 55. 5j Daily Telegraph, 23 September 1876, p. 5, quoted in Nead, Victorian Babylon, p. 208. 58 In 1662, an Act of Parliament provided for the widening of a number of bottlenecks in the Cities of London and Westminster, including at Temple Bar, but nothing was done (Reddaway, The Rebuilding of London, p. 38, including n. 1). 59 Repertory 73, fol. 196. 60 Repertory 74, fols 243-44. 61 GLMS184/4, fol. 30. 62 Hatton, A New View of London, p. ix, and Strype, A Survey of London, 1, Book 3, p. 278. Strype's identification was repeated in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1750 (Gomme (ed.), The Gentleman's Magazine Library, p. 201). Other, almost certainly wrong, identifications have included Catherine of Braganza. 63 Journal 47, fol. 19b. The former Lord Mayor William Turner was a member of this committee. 64 For example, in May 1673, the Committee for Public Works ordered that Christopher Wren Esq, his

Majesty's Surveyor General, be desired together with the City Surveyors to examine Mr Jerman's bills relating to Temple Bar, and to certify to this committee in writing their opinion concerning the rates for the several




particulars thereof, [especially] the scaffolding, centring and hording about Temple Bar, and to remember that the same be not inserted in Mr Marshall's account' (City Lands Committee Journal Ei, fol. 13). An entry in Hooke's diary, dated 23 May 1673, reads 'Dr Wrens. With Mr Hoskings to Temple Bar. Dined at Sir Chr. Wrens', while on 31 March 1674 he noted: To Temple Bar reported Rog. Jarmin's Bill for Temple Bar. To Sir Chr. Wren dined there.' These entries were quoted in Wren Society, xix, The Nineteenth Volume of the Wren Society (Oxford, 1942), p. 146, and repeated in Summerson's handwritten assessment (see my note 13), to suggest Wren's involvement in the building of Temple Bar. What has not previously been explored is Hooke's possible hand in the design. His involvement at an earlier stage is in fact more likely given his status as City Surveyor, in which capacity he designed a new facade for Newgate and Moorgate (Mann, 'The Gates of London in the Seventeenth Century', pp. 11-14, 18-20; Michael Cooper, Robert Hooke and the Rebuilding of London [Stroud, 2005], pp. 178-79). 65 In 1662, Balthazar Gerbier had published A Brief Discourse Concerning the Three Chief Principles of Magnificent Building, viz., Solidity, Conveniency, and Ornament, which touched on the 'makeing of a Sumptuous Gate at Temple Barr whereof a draught hath been presented to his Sacred Majesty' (Noble, Memorials of Temple Bar, p. 27; see also Christine Stevenson's essay in the present volume). I have been unable to establish whether this design had any impact on the new gate as executed a decade later in 1670-72. Nor have I come across any direct evidence of the involvement of Peter Mills, who worked on the temporary arches erected for Charles II's coronation in 1660 (possibly with Gerbier) and was appointed a City Surveyor alongside Hooke after the Fire, but he could have had some input before his death in the second half of 1670 - as could the third City Surveyor, John Oliver, who worked closely with Hooke during this period. 66 Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth or The Long Parliament, quoted in London and the Civil War, ed. Porter, p. 1. 67 Jonathan Sawday, 'Re-writing a Revolution: History, Symbol, and Text in the Restoration', The Seventeenth Century, 7 (1992), pp. 171-99. 68 Christopher Hill, Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution (Madison WI, 1980), p. 10. 69 Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II, pp. 2, 37. 70 In a similar move to that in 1669, the Privy Council in 1636 directed certain Aldermen, the Recorder of the City and Jones to confer about a new gate at Temple Bar (Harris and Higgott, Inigo Jones, p. 251). 71 For the designs by Jones and Webb, see Harris and Higgott, Inigo Jones, pp. 251-53, and Peacock and Anderson, Tnigo Jones, John Webb and Temple Bar'. Peacock and Anderson include a transcript of Webb's 'Notes of Practise upon the Gate at Temple barr: 1638', which was published much earlier, though misattributed, in E. W. Godwin, Temple Bar (London, 1877). 72 Katharine Mary Beatrice Gibson, '"Best Belov'd of Kings": the Iconography of King Charles IF (unpublished PhD thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 1997), 11, p. 168. Gibson noted that the extent to which the king was involved in the choice and arrangement of these figures can only be guessed, but also pointed out that two obscure phrases of George Vertue's suggest Charles may have seen stucco models beforehand: 'for the King he did the statues of King Charles first and second in Stucco. But the first works he did publick was the two statues. The one side of Temple Bar.' 73 Smith, The Royal Image and the English People, p. 107, has interpreted the rebuilding of Aldgate and Aldersgate as a process of commemorating in stone James I's state entry. 74 Downes, The Architecture of Wren, p. 124, n. 143. j^ The statues in niches of the Royal Exchange rebuilt after the Fire echoed those of the original Exchange. 76 Downes, The Architecture of Wren, p. 124, n. 143. jj Hooke and Wren seem to have been jointly involved, at least in an advisory capacity, at the Guildhall at the same time as Temple Bar. On 14 September 1671, two years after the initial restoration of the Guildhall following the Fire, a plan was presented to the City Aldermen for an 'addition of building to the Guildhall porch for ornament and public use' (Repertory 76, fols 248^49). It is recorded that a design and estimate were approved and that the matter was referred to Hooke and Wren. It is important to note that this entry in the City records, as with those touching on Temple Bar, does not explicitly identify a single designer, and even implies that Wren and Hooke's involvement in the project began after a design had been agreed. For more on the work done at the Guildhall, see John Edward Price, A Descriptive Account of the Guildhall of the City of London: Its History and Associations (London, 1886), p. 72. 78 Gibson, 'The Iconography of Charles IF, pp. 97-98. 79 Hatton, A New View of London, p. ix. 80 Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II, p. 104.




81 This act inspired others: for example, William Hone, a dissenting joiner, set up the Magna Charta on the gate in January 1681. See Gary S. De Krey, 'London Radicals and Revolutionary Politics, 1675-1683', in The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, ed. Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie (Oxford, 1990), pp. 133-62 (p. 152). 82 Smith, The Royal Image and the English People, p. 111. 83 Quoted in Milne, The Great Fire of London, p. 19. 84 Smith, The Royal Image and the English People, p. 113. 85 Noble Collection, Guildhall Library. 86 This event is described by De Krey, A Fractured Society, p. 60. The function of Temple Bar as a site of general protest against the powers that be in Westminster is illustrated in an eighteenth-century print in the Guildhall Library Print Department, in which Londoners are shown burning an effigy of Robert Walpole at Temple Bar in protest against his imposition of new excise duties. 87 For the transformation of Paris' s walls and gates, see Kostof, The City Assembled, p. 33. 88 For the royal entry as a Vehicle for dialogue', see Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 14.50-1650 (Woodbridge, 1999), p. 11.



in defence of the city: the gates of london and temple bar in the seventeenth century

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