Authors: Leon Uris
THE CITY
of London is a tiny fiefdom of one square mile running along the Thames Embankment from about Waterloo Bridge to Tower Bridge. The City is autonomous and each year with great pomp renews its status by payment to the crown of six horseshoes, sixty-one horseshoe nails, a hatchet, and a billhook. Within its seven hundred acres, the Lord Mayor is sovereign only to the crown and when the king or queen enters its boundaries, they must pause for official permission and welcome of the Lord Mayor.
The numerous wigged and gowned ceremonies clash with a twinge of humor with the miniskirted young ladies of the financial district.
In ancient times the various guilds of fishmongers, ironmongers, grocers, vintners, and the like, selected London’s officials, who wore robes and carried maces and scepters and swords of state denoting their positions.
The boundaries of The City are marked, the most prominent being the statue of the griffin where the Strand becomes Fleet Street before the Royal Courts. Tradition called for a father to take his son to the boundary and whack him on the backside so he could always remember the limitations of his traveling, a ceremony called “beating the bounds.”
Within its magic mile, The City holds Fleet Street, the newspaper center of the world, the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, as the Bank of England is known, Lloyd’s, Petticoat Lane, the Tower of London, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Old Bailey, blackly renowned as the world’s most famous criminal court, the great fish markets, all under the protection of ceremonial pikemen and in day to day life by six foot bobbies with distinctive marking on their hats to distinguish them from other London bobbies.
There is yet another great institution in The City, the Royal Courts of Justice and three of the four Inns of Court. As The City is autonomous from greater London, so are the Inns of Court autonomous from The City.
The Inns of Court came into existence centuries ago when the Knights Templar, holy brothers in arms, were given a habitation in 1099 to “carrie on their vows of chastity and poverty” intermixed with some bloody doings. They were abolished by order of the Pope in 1312 but the Templars survive today through the Masonic Fraternity whose Freemasons cherish the distinction of the degree of Knight Templar.
With the demise of the Templars the lawyers drifted into The Temple in the 1200s. Lawyers as well as doctors in those days were priests and the law was canon in nature.
The Magna Carta and King Henry III ended much canon law and after a time converted to common law. The Inns were then to take permanent possession of legal education and the legal world.
There is an ancient verse that sums up the Inns.
Gray’s Inn for walks,
Lincoln’s Inn for a wall,
The Inner Temple for a garden,
The Middle Temple for a hall.
Middle Temple Hall is staggering in heraldry. It was here that the first performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was held. The serving table below the dais is made of timber from Sir Francis Drake’s
Golden Hind
and Elizabeth and her admirals were its patrons. Under its sign of the Holy Lamb Oliver Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson and Blackstone practiced and Chaucer resided and wrote the
Canterbury Tales.
No less than five members of the Middle Temple signed the American Declaration of Independence. In its gardens the thirty year War of the Roses commenced.
Yet it is the hall that remains the overpowering and magnificent mark of Middle Temple. A hundred feet in length it soars fifty feet with a timbered carved roof of Elizabethan hammered beams. In the year of 1574, some time before the Spanish Armada, a magnificent hand-carved wooden screen was erected to span the forty-five foot girth of the hall. Rows of ponderous tables run the length of the hall toward the dais flanked by a wainscoted wall holding the coats of arms of Treasurers and Readers. At the dais the Benchers or Elders of the Temple preside over somber dinners and wild revelry. Over the side and end walls are fourteen stained glass windows with coats of arms of the Lord Chancellors from Middle Temple. Royal patrons painted by Hogarth and Van Dyke stare down on it all.
Crossing a narrow lane one leaves Middle Temple and enters Inner Temple, whose best-known landmark is the Knights Templar Church dedicated in 1185. It miraculously escaped the periodic fires which leveled The City during the Middle Ages but was gutted in the Blitz. Now, brilliantly restored, it is one of England’s few round churches, modeled after the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem with floors covered with thirteenth century marble effigies of knights and an arcade of grotesque stone heads representing souls in hell. Near them were the cells where paupers, debtors, and other sinners starved to death watching the knights in their holy prayer. Christopher Wren beautified it with a rectangular nave.
Much of the Inner Temple had been destroyed and rebuilt because of fire and war, but it is her names that make her glory permanent. Charles Lamb and William Makepeace Thackeray and Boswell and Charles Dickens. And rich are the names of its buildings and lanes of Hare Court and Figtree Court and Ram Alley and King’s Bench Walk with its immensity of lawn flowing down to the Thames.
Both segments of the Temple, Middle and Inner, are cut off from the outside world and the bustle of Fleet Street and the Victoria Embankment by Christopher Wren gates and walls.
On the rear side of the Law Courts, between High Holborn and Carey Street, stands Lincoln’s Inn on a site once occupied by the Friars on what is now known as Chancery Lane. When the archbishop of Canterbury changed their name to Blackfriars, their houses were chartered to Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln in 1285. Heart of the pastoral fields of Lincoln’s Inn is Old Hall, erected in 1489, and it is still intact and used as a lecture room. This is the Inn of William Pitt and Disraeli and Cromwell and the martyr Thomas More, who was among its nine prime ministers and twenty Lord Chancellors.
Across High Holborn, a street named for a path burned by the great fire, and just beyond the reach of The City, lies the quadrangle of the fourth Inn, Gray’s. This is the place of Sir Francis Bacon. Gray’s is mostly inactive today as a base for practicing barristers, with most of its offices leased to solicitors.
The Four Inns are part and parcel of English history and greatness. They form the Law University and in addition to their own particular individuality they have enormous libraries, conduct moots or mock trials, are recipients of royal patronage, are filled with students, and hold the formal dinners where new barristers are called to the bar.
While the world swirls around them they continue to live in a quasi-monastic serenity, gowned in their distinctive robes and traditionally going to war together in a single Inns of Court Regiment.
In each building, a Queen’s Counsel or senior barrister “leads” the juniors in a set of chambers. Often two barristers from the same chamber argue from opposite sides of the courtroom.
Some say this is a private debating society and that these two thousand barristers are too privileged and that the thousands upon thousands of examples of common law are too archaic and intricate.
Yet, here is law for law’s sake. The barrister argues the case for a set fee and is not allowed to take a portion of a client’s judgment. He may not be sued for what he says in court. On the other hand he is not permitted to sue a client for fees.
Within the Inns corruption is unknown.
The barrister is judged by a man who has been chosen from the ranks of Queen’s counsels in a no nonsense courtroom.
A new student taken into a chamber to study is fearfully admonished that he is in the home of the Knights Templar, in the midst of kings and queens, statesmen and judges and philosophers and writers. He is to he governed by the Benchers or elders and receives the wisdom of the Reader or chief lecturer.
A young man or many older people possessing a standard diploma and a few hundred pounds may enter an Inn and be taken by a master in chambers.
Many a brilliant barrister in the courtroom is impatient in drafting his pleadings and here a new pupil can worm his way into his master’s good graces. Doing research and drafting immaculate, painstaking, technically perfect pleadings can endear the pupil to the master.
The pupil makes as little an ass of himself as possible. He reads his master’s papers, looks up points of law for him, accompanies him to court, and works hard and late.
The pupil learns to have every point of law at his master’s finger tips. He develops the skill of taking fast and accurate notes in court and anticipating the master’s questions.
This goes on for a year or so. There is study, attendance at a number of required dinners at the Inn, and the arguing of a moot or mock trial.
A few things fall the student’s way. Some overly busy junior in the chambers may need a hand to “devil” or prepare his work or even argue a minor case in the county.
Each set of chambers, numbering from two to twenty barristers, is managed by a clerk, an all important man who can speed the pupil on his career or keep him moldering. He deals on the barristers’ behalf with the solicitor’s offices, assigns cases, sets the fees, and works for a portion of them.
Having deviled, argued minor cases, and shown diligence, the clerk will begin to throw a few things to the bright young man.
To advance his progress the student writes for law journals and puts his name in with the legal aid people.
After the call to the bar and assignment to a decent set of chambers the new junior is with ten or so other juniors and led by an eminent Q.C. Good juniors are in demand. In five years he may be able to afford a larger room in chambers. One day, after a particularly brilliant showing, the Q.C rewards the junior with a red bag to carry his gown, wig, and books in.
After fifteen or so years as a junior the crown may appoint the junior to be a Queen’s Counsel. The robe made of “stuff” is discarded and the Q.C. “takes silk.”
As a Q.C. one merely has to argue the case with all the preparation being done by the juniors.
At the age of fifty or more a prominent Q.C. may be appointed to the bench as a judge and automatically knighted. It is the pinnacle of the legal career.
On the other hand, he may remain a junior barrister until his dying day.
1
October 1945
P
ARLIAMENT
S
QUARE WAS INUNDATED
with the clang of great bells to ring in a new legal year with ancient majestic pageantry.
The war was over and England had survived with the empire intact Englishmen were going about the business of cleaning up the rubbish in the center of London where the Hun had left his mark and soon all of that would be in the past. There would be the return to order and tradition as it had been before. There was talk of brave new worlds but this kind of talk followed every war, it seemed. No dynamic changes would be in store for England. They liked things tidy without the dramatic upheavals of the Latins and Levantines. Yes, the new era would be exactly like the old one.
If one doubted that, they had only to be there on this day and they would understand what England was all about Within the walls of Westminster Abbey, the Lord Chancellor, resplendent in black and gold robes, led the judges of England and the barristers in a sacred service. As they worshiped in pursuit of divine guidance in dispensation of the law, their Roman Catholic counterparts conducted a Red Mass in their cathedral.
The great doors of the abbey swung open. The procession is begun. It is led by the mace bearer, a tall thin grim chap, and then the bearer of the great seal. Each is attired in knee britches, buckled shoes, and a cascade of lace embroidery.
Behind them, Lord Ramsey, the Lord Chancellor, wearied by the burden of office. The train bearer follows the Lord Chancellor’s stately pace as they cross the great way toward the House of Lords.
There then followed a flamboyantly cloaked array of the Lord Chancellor’s judges: The scarlet-robed Lord Chief Justice whose ermined collar bore the heavy golden chain of the House of Lancaster. Thence the Master of the Rolls, the traditional deputy of the Lord Chancellor and head of the Chancery Courts, and the others in order of their rank, all dressed in britches, buckled shoes, full-bottomed wigs. Now the President of the Probate, Divorce, and Admiralty Division and the Lords Justices of Appeal in cumbersome black and gold and the flaming-robed Justices of the High Court.
A long line of the senior barristers, the King’s Counsel, in black silk gowns and great wigs born of the Queen Anne era. Lastly came the junior barristers.
They are received in the Royal Gallery in the House of Lords after crossing from the east end of the abbey.
In this time of talk of dramatic change one hears that the law is archaic, living in a private sanctuary of its practitioners, in shocking need of reform, and choking on its own ancient rituals. One hears that common law is filled with symbols of other times. Yet, nearing its thousandth year of use it would be difficult to argue that any other system devised by man surpasses it and it would be equally difficult to contend that it doesn’t fulfill the modern needs of justice with surety and dispatch.
The soul of English law is the Lord Chancellor and in this time it is Cyril Ramsey who has reached the epitome of his profession and taken an office which seems far too demanding for a single man. His head wears three crowns.
The Lord Chancellor is one of the few men in the world who hold positions in all branches of government. As the ranking judge of England, Lord Ramsey is the leader of the entire legal structure. He recommends the judges and appoints the junior barristers to the exalted inner realm of King’s Counsel.
He is the Speaker of the House of Lords and presides over that body, sitting on the ancient Woolsack, symbol of his office in Parliament.
He is the chief legal adviser to the Crown.
He is a member of the cabinet.
In Parliament he helps in the passage of the laws. As an adviser and cabinet member he helps execute them. As a judge, he enforces them.