e
hall-door he mounted his mule, trapped with crimson and having a saddle
covered with crimson velvet, while the gentlemen ushers, bareheaded,
cried,--"On, masters, before, and make room for my lord cardinal." When
Wolsey was mounted he was preceded by his two cross-bearers and his two
pillow-bearers, all upon horses trapped in scarlet; and four footmen
with pole-axes guarded the cardinal till he came to Westminster. And
every Sunday, when he repaired to the king's court at Greenwich, he
landed at the Three Cranes, in the Vintrey, and took water again at
Billingsgate. "He had," says Cavendish, "a long season, ruling all
things in the realm appertaining to the king, by his wisdom, and all
other matters of foreign regions with whom the king had any occasion to
meddle, and then he fell like Lucifer, never to rise again. Here," says
Cavendish, "is the end and fall of pride; for I assure you he was in his
time the proudest man alive, having more regard to the honour of his
person than to his spiritual functions, wherein he should have expressed
more meekness and humility."

One of the greatest names connected with Chancery Lane is that of the
unfortunate Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, who, after leading his master,
Charles I., on the path to the scaffold, was the first to lay his head
upon the block. Wentworth, the son of a Yorkshire gentleman, was born in
1593 in Chancery Lane, at the house of Mr. Atkinson, his maternal
grandfather, a bencher of Lincoln's Inn. At first an enemy of
Buckingham, the king's favourite, and opposed to the Court, he was won
over by a peerage and the counsels of his friend Lord Treasurer Weston.
He soon became a headlong and unscrupulous advocate of arbitrary power,
and, as Lord Deputy of Ireland, did his best to raise an army for the
king and to earn his Court name of "Thorough." Impeached for high
treason, and accused by Sir Henry Vane of a design to subdue England by
force, he was forsaken by the weak king and condemned to the block. "Put
not your trust in princes," he said, when he heard of the king's consent
to the execution of so faithful a servant, "nor in any child of man, for
in them is no salvation." He died on Tower Hill, with calm and undaunted
courage, expressing his devotion to the Church of England, his loyalty
to the king, and his earnest desire for the peace and welfare of the
kingdom.

Of this steadfast and dangerous man Clarendon has left one of those
Titianesque portraits in wh