In Queen Anne’s reign Gay sketches the dangers of night in these fields; he warns his readers to avoid the lurking thief, by day a beggar, or else-- “The crutch, which late compassion moved, shall wound Thy bleeding head, and fell thee to the ground. Nor trust the linkman,” he adds, “along the lonely wall, or he’ll put out his light and rob you, but-- “Still keep the public streets where oily rays That from the crystal lamp o’erspread the ways.” The south side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields was built and named three years before the Restoration, by Sir William Cowper, James Cowper, and Robert Henley. In 1668 Portugal Row, as it was called, but not from Charles’s queen,[699] was extremely fashionable. There were then living here such noble and noted persons as Lady Arden, William Perpoint, Esq., Sir Charles Waldegrave, Lady Fitzharding, Lady Diana Curzon, Serjeant Maynard, Lord Cardigan, Mrs. Anne Heron, Lady Mordant, Richard Adams, Esq., Lady Carr, Lady Wentworth, Mr. Attorney Montagu, Lady Coventry, Judge Welch, and Lady Davenant.[700] Mr. Serjeant Maynard was the brave old Presbyterian lawyer, then eighty-seven, who replied to the Prince of Orange, when he said that he must have outlived all the men of law of his time--“Sir, I should have outlived the law itself had not your highness come over.” Lady Davenant was the widow of Sir William Davenant, the Oxford innkeeper’s son, the poet and manager, who, aided by Whitlocke and Maynard, was allowed in Cromwell’s time to perform operas at a theatre in Charterhouse Square. After the Restoration he had the theatre in Portugal Street. He died in 1668, insolvent. His poems were published by his widow, and dedicated to the Duke of York in 1673. Lord Cardigan was the father of the infamous Countess of Shrewsbury, who is said, disguised as a page, to have held her lover the Duke of Buckingham’s horse while he killed her husband in a duel near Barn Elms. The Earl of Rochester lived in the house next the Duke’s Theatre,[701] which stood behind the present College of Surgeons, as Davenant says in one of his epilogues-- “The prospect of the sea cannot be shown, Therefore be pleased to think that you are all Behind the row which men call Portugal.” In September 1586 Ballard, Babington, and other conspirators against the life of Queen Elizabeth were put to death in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Babington was a young man of good family, who had been a page to the Earl of Shrewsbury, and had plotted to rescue Mary and assassinate Elizabeth. His plot discovered, he had fled to St. John’s Wood for concealment. Seven of these plotters were hanged on the first day, and seven on the second. The last seven were allowed to die, by special grace, before being disembowelled by the executioner.