One of the chief features of Lincoln’s Inn is the Tudor Gateway, which forms the main entrance into Chancery Lane. The liberality of Sir Thomas Lovell, one of the Benchers of the Society, and Treasurer of the Household of Henry VII., was chiefly responsible for its erection. This magnificent Gatehouse, with its flanking Towers of brick, built in 1518, whilst Wolsey was Chancellor, narrowly escaped destruction, in obedience to the imperious will of Lord Grimthorpe and his Gothic followers. Fortunately it has survived, and, with the exception of the magnificent Gatehouses of Lambeth Palace and St. James’s Palace, remains almost alone as a specimen of this period of architecture in London, when the Gothic was yielding place to the Palladian style. The walls of the massive tower, four stories high, are striped with diagonal lines of darker brick. The entrance, under an obtusely-pointed arch, was originally vaulted. The groining has disappeared, but the front still bears, in a heraldic compartment over the arch, the arms of Henry VIII. within the Garter, and crowned, having on the dexter side the purple lion of Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, and on the sinister the arms and quarterings of Sir Thomas Lovell. The bricks of which this Gatehouse and the outer wall of Lincoln’s Inn are built have an interest beyond their colour and their age. For upon the task of laying them ‘Rare Ben Jonson’ [Illustration: OLD SQUARE, LINCOLN’S INN SHOWING the interior side of the gateway, built in 1518. Ben Jonson worked as a bricklayer on this gatehouse.] is said to have laboured, trowel in hand and book in pocket. Aubrey, in his ‘Lives,’ records that Ben Jonson worked some time with his father-in-law, a bricklayer, ‘and particularly on the garden wall of Lincoln’s Inne, next to Chancery Lane.... A bencher, walking thro’ and hearing him repeat some Greeke verses out of Homer, and finding him to have a wit extraordinary, gave him some exhibition to maintain him at Trinity College in Cambridge.’ This is only a tradition, though a very likely one; and, as Leigh Hunt says, tradition is valuable when it helps to make such a flower grow out of an old wall. Within the Gatehouse a small Quadrangle is formed by the Chapel, Old Library, and the two wings of Old Buildings. Octagonal turret-staircases fill the corners of these brick buildings, and in the turret at the South-East corner lived Thurloe, who was Secretary of State to Oliver Cromwell. A tablet in Chancery Lane, on the outer face of the building, records this fact, whilst the Treasurership of William Pitt in 1794 is apparently thought so little worthy of memorial that the sundial which once commemorated it has been allowed to disappear.[51] A portrait by Gainsborough of that great Statesman hangs in the Benchers’ Room. Tradition has it that Oliver Cromwell once had chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, an idea which probably sprang from the fact that Richard Cromwell was a student here in 1647.