The refectory of the convent, being preserved, afterwards became the Whitefriars Theatre. Edward VI.-who, with all his promise, was as ready for such pillage as his tyrannical father-pulled down the church, and built noblemen's houses in its stead. In time, greedy hands were laid roughly on cope and chalice, and Henry VIII., seizing on the friars' domains, gave his physician-that Doctor Butts mentioned by Shakespeare-the chapter-house for a residence. In Courtenay, Earl of Devon, rebuilt the Whitefriars Church, and in a Bishop of Hereford added a steeple. and Ram Alley were then part of their domain, and there they watched the river and prayed for their patrons' souls. In the reign of Edward I., a certain Sir Robert Gray, moved by qualms of conscience or honest impulse, founded on the bank of the Thames, east of the well-guarded Temple, a Carmelite convent, with broad gardens, where the white friars might stroll, and with shady nooks where they might con their missals.
The dingy lane, now only awakened by the quick wheel of the swift newspaper cart or the ponderous tires of the sullen coal-wagon, was in olden times for ever ringing with clash of swords, the cries of quarrelsome gamblers, and the drunken songs of noisy Bobadils. Turned it into a debtors' sanctuary and thieves' paradise, and for half a century its bullies and swindlers waged a ceaseless war with their proud and rackety neighbours of the Temple.
#Fallen london a disgraceful spectacle full
Whitefriars that dull, narrow, uninviting lane sloping from to the river, with gas works at its foot and mean shops on either sidewas once the centre of a district full of noblemen's mansions but Time's harlequin wand by-and-by So rich is London in legend and tradition, that even some of the spots that now appear the blankest, baldest, and most uninteresting, are really vaults of entombed anecdote and treasurehouses of old story.
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