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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
In the seventeenth century London was a walled city, as it had been since the Romans fortified it around 200 AD. 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. 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. 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’. 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, 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).
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 Merrifield, Ralph, The Roman City of London (London, 1965), pp. 101–11, 316–20Google Scholar; Schofield, John, The Building of London from the Conquest to the Great Fire (London, 1984), p. 129.Google Scholar
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 Wontner, Hugh, ‘The Gates of the City: A Method of Defence’, Transactions of the Guildhall Historical Association, 5 (1982), pp. 75–82 (p. 80).Google Scholar
6 Summerson, John, Georgian London (London, 1988), p. 40 Google Scholar. 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 Kostof, Spiro, The City Assembled: The Elements of Urban Form Through History (London, 1992), p. 26.Google Scholar
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 Peacock, John and Anderson, Christy, ‘Inigo Jones, John Webb and Temple Bar’, Architectural History, 44 (2001), pp. 29–38 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harris, John and Higgott, Gordon, Inigo Jones: Complete Architectural Drawings (London, 1989), pp. 251–53 Google Scholar; and Hart, Vaughan, Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts (London, 1994), pp. 169–721.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 Noble, T. C., Memorials of Temple Bar (London, 1869)Google Scholar 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 Shipley, Neal R., ‘The City Lands Committee, 1592–1642’, Guildhall Studies in London History, 2:4 (1977), pp. 161–78 (p. 170)Google Scholar. 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 Mann, Emily, “The Gates of London in the Seventeenth Century’ (unpublished MA dissertation, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 2003), pp. 22–26.Google Scholar
18 John Evelyn: London Revived – Consideration for its Rebuilding in 1666, ed. E. S. De Beer (Oxford, 1938), p. 50.
19 See Hook, Judith, The Baroque Age in England (London, 1976), p. 71 Google Scholar, 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 Ralph, James, 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.Google Scholar
22 Ibid., p. 16.
23 Ibid., p. 23.
24 Smith, Nicola, The Royal Image and the English People (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 96–109 Google Scholar, 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 Colvin, Howard, ‘Pompous Entries and English Architecture’, in Essays in English Architectural History (New Haven and London, 1999), pp. 67–93 Google Scholar. 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 Ward-Jackson, Philip, Public Sculpture of the City of London (Liverpool, 2003), pp. 260–68.Google Scholar
26 Moore, J. E., ‘The Monument, or, Christopher Wren’s Roman Accent’, Art Bulletin, 80:3 (1998), pp. 499–533 (p. 509).Google Scholar
27 Vincent, Thomas, God’s Terrible Voice in the City (1667)Google Scholar, quoted in Milne, Gustav, The Great Fire of London (London, 1986), p. 29.Google Scholar
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 Aubin, R. A. (ed.), London in Flames, London in Glory: poems on the rebuilding of London, 1666–1709 (;New Brunswick, 1943).Google Scholar
29 See Roy, Ian, ‘“This Proud Unthankefull City”: A Cavalier View of London in the Civil War’, in London and the Civil War, ed. Porter, Stephen (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 149–74 (p. 149)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 The watch and curfew were observed well into the eighteenth century.
31 Smith, Victor and Kelsey, Peter, ‘The Lines of Communication’, in London and the Civil War, ed. Porter, , pp. 117–48 (p. 122).Google Scholar
32 Smith, and Kelsey, , ‘The Lines of Communication’, p. 118.Google Scholar
33 For analysis of the events leading to the Restoration, see Harris, Tim, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration Until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 36–52 Google Scholar, and Jones, J. R., Country and Court: England 1658–1714 (London, 1978), ch. 6, pp. 113–39.Google Scholar
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 42–42K
37 The Rump’s actions apparently had some precedent. Johnson, Henry, 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 Google Scholar, 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 Bell, W. G., Cottrill, F. and Spon, C., 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 Google Scholar. 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 Gough, William, 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.Google Scholar
42 For the reasons for and ramifications of the removal of the City’s Charter, see Levin, Jennifer, The Charter Controversy in the City of London, 1660–1688, and its Consequences (London, 1969)Google Scholar.
43 Quoted in Porter, Stephen, The Great Fire of London (Stroud, 1996), pp. 87–88 Google Scholar. 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 Wall, Cynthia, The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (Cambridge, 1998), p. 47.Google Scholar
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 Hatton, Edward, A New View of London; or, an Ample Account of that City, 2 vols (London, 1708), 1, p. ix.Google Scholar
51 Morning Herald, 19 May 1834.
52 Pasquin, Anthony (alias Edwin, John, real name Williams, John), The Metropolitan Prophecy, 1788, quoted by Noble, Memorials of Temple Bar, pp. 33–34.Google Scholar
53 Nead, Lynda, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven and London, 2000), p. 203.Google Scholar
54 Ibid., p. 206.
55 Markus, Thomas A., Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types (London, 1993), p. xx.Google Scholar
56 For the ‘theatre of street polities’, see Nicholas Rogers, quoted in De Krey, Gary S., A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the First Age of Party, 1688–1715 (Oxford, 1985), p. 55.Google Scholar
57 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 GL MS 184/4, fol. 30.
62 Hatton, A New View of London, p. ix, and Strype, A Survey of London, I, 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 E1, 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 façade for Newgate and Moorgate (Mann, ‘The Gates of London in the Seventeenth Century’, pp. 11–14, 18–20; Cooper, Michael, Robert Hooke and the Rebuilding of London [Stroud, 2005], pp. 178–79).Google Scholar
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 IPs 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 Hobbes, Thomas, Behemoth or The Long Parliament, quoted in London and the Civil War, ed. Porter, , p. 1.Google Scholar
67 Sawday, Jonathan, ‘Re-writing a Revolution: History, Symbol, and Text in the Restoration’, The Seventeenth Century, 7 (1992), pp. 171–99.Google Scholar
68 Hill, Christopher, Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution (Madison WI, 1980), p. 10.Google Scholar
69 Harris, , London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II, pp. 2, 37.Google Scholar
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 Godwin, E. W., Temple Bar (London, 1877).Google Scholar
72 Beatrice Gibson, Katharine Mary, ‘“Best Belov’d of Kings”: the Iconography of King Charles II’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 1997), 11, p. 168 Google Scholar. 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.
75 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.
77 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 248b-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 Price, John Edward, A Descriptive Account of the Guildhall of the City of London: Its History and Associations (London, 1886), p. 72.Google Scholar
78 Gibson, , ‘The Iconography of Charles II’, pp. 97–98.Google Scholar
79 Hatton, , A New View of London, p. ix.Google Scholar
80 Harris, , London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II, p. 104.Google Scholar
81 This act inspired others: for example, William Hone, a dissenting joiner, set up the Magna Charta on the gate in January 1681. See De Krey, Gary S., ‘London Radicals and Revolutionary Politics, 1675–1683’, in The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, ed. Harris, Tim, Seaward, Paul and Goldie, Mark (Oxford, 1990), pp. 133–62 (p. 152).Google Scholar
82 Smith, , The Royal Image and the English People, p. 111.Google Scholar
83 Quoted in Milne, The Great Eire 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 Strong, Roy, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1650 (Woodbridge, 1999), p. 11.Google Scholar