The chapel, of debased Perpendicular Gothic, was built by Inigo Jones, and
consecrated in 1623, Dr. Donne the poet preaching the consecration sermon.
The stained glass was the work of a Mr. Hale of Fetter Lane. The twelve
apostles, Moses, and the prophets still glow like immortal flowers,
bright as when Donne, or Ussher, watched the light they shed. One of the
windows bears the name of Bernard van Linge, the same man probably who
executed the windows at Wadham College, Oxford.[669] Noy, the
Attorney-General and creature of Charles I., a friend of Laud, and the
proposer of the writ for ship-money, put up the window representing John
the Baptist, rather an ominous saint, surely, in Charles’s time. Noy died
in 1634, before the storm which would certainly have carried his head off.
He left his money to a prodigal son, who was afterwards killed in a
duel,--“Left to be squandered, and I hope no better from him,” says the
dying man, bitterly. It was Noy who decided the curious case of the three
graziers who left their money with their hostess. One of them afterwards
returned and ran off with the money; upon which the other two sued the
woman, denying their consent. Mr. Noy pleaded that the money was ready to
be given up directly the three men came together and claimed it.[670]
Rogers tells this story in his poem of “Italy,” and gives it a romantic
turn.
Laud, always restless for novelties that could look like Rome, and yet not
be Rome, referred to the Lincoln’s Inn windows at his trial. He wondered
at a Mr. Brown objecting to such things, considering he was not of
Lincoln’s Inn, “where Mr. Prynne’s zeal had not yet beaten down the images
of the apostles in the fair windows of that chapel, which windows were set
up new long since the statute of Edward VI.; and it is well known,” says
that enemy of the Puritans, “that I was once resolved to have returned
this upon Mr. Brown in the House of Commons, but changed my mind, lest
thereby I might have set some furious spirit at work to destroy those
harmless goodly windows, to the just dislike of that worthy society.”[671]
The crypt under the chapel rests on many pillars and strong-backed arches,
and, like the cloisters in the Temple, was intended as a place for
student-lawyers to walk in and exchange learning. Butler describes
witnesses of the straw-bail species waiting here for customers,[672] just
as half a century ago they used to haunt the doors of Chancery Lane
gin-shops. On a June day in 1663 Pepys came to walk under the chapel by
appointment, after pacing up and down and admiring the new garden then
constructing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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