plate and then suits of armour. In the first
lottery (1569) there were 40,000 lots at 10s. a lot, and the profits
were applied to repairing the harbours of England.

In the reign of James I. blood was again shed before St. Paul's. Years
before a bishop had been murdered at the north door; now, before the
west entrance (in January, 1605-6), four of the desperate Gunpowder Plot
conspirators (Sir Everard Digby, Winter, Grant, and Bates) were there
hung, drawn, and quartered. Their attempt to restore the old religion by
one blow ended in the hangman's strangling rope and the executioner's
cruel knife. In the May following a man of less-proven guilt (Garnet,
the Jesuit) suffered the same fate in St. Paul's Churchyard; and zealots
of his faith affirmed that on straws saved from the scaffold miraculous
portraits of their martyr were discovered.

The ruinous state of the great cathedral, still without a tower, now
aroused the theological king. He first tried to saddle the bishop and
chapter, but Lord Southampton, Shakespeare's friend, interposed to save
them. Then the matter went to sleep for twelve years. In 1620 the king
again awoke, and came in state with all his lords on horseback, to hear
a sermon at the Cross and to view the church. A royal commission
followed, Inigo Jones, the king's _protege_, whom James had brought from
Denmark, being one of the commissioners. The sum required was estimated
at L22,536. The king's zeal ended here; and his favourite, Buckingham,
borrowed the stone collected for St. Paul's for his Strand palace, and
from parts of it was raised that fine watergate still existing in the
Thames Embankment gardens.

When Charles I. made that narrow-minded churchman, Laud, Bishop of
London, one of Laud's first endeavours was to restore St. Paul's.
Charles I. was a man of taste, and patronised painting and architecture.
Inigo Jones was already building the Banqueting House at Whitehall. The
king was so pleased with Inigo's design for the new portico of St.
Paul's, that he proposed to pay for that himself. Laud gave L1,200. The
fines of the obnoxious and illegal High Commission Court were set apart
for the same object. The small sheds and houses round the west front
were ruthlessly cleared away. All shops in Cheapside and Lombard Street,
except goldsmiths, were to be shut up, that the eastern approach to St.
Paul's might appear more splendid. The church of St. Gregory, at the
south-west wing of the cathedral,