White Horse Inn

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W. J. Loftie, adding to the incomplete work of Sir Walter Besant, in The Fascination of London, published in 1903, continues his survey of the Inns of Chancery with this look at White Horse Inn:

The further court is bounded on the east side by one of the few very old buildings left in London. This was formerly the White Horse Inn, but is now also part of the Mercers' School buildings.

Timbs quotes from Lord Eldon's "Anecdote Book," 1776, in which Lord Eldon says he came to the White Horse Inn when he left school, and here met his brother, Lord Stowell, who took him to see the play at Drury Lane, where "Lowe played Jobson in the farce, and Miss Pope played Nell.

When we came out of the house it rained hard. There were then few hackney coaches, and we both got into one sedan-chair. Turning out of Fleet Street into Fetter Lane there was a sort of contest between our chairmen and some persons who were coming up Fleet Street...In the struggle the sedan-chair was overset, with us in it."

The white boundary wall of the Mercers' School replaces the old wall of the noted Swan Distillery (now rebuilt). This distillery was an object of attack in the Gordon Riots, partly, perhaps, because of its stores, and partly because its owner was a Roman Catholic. It was looted, and the liquor ran down in the streets, where men and women drank themselves mad. Dickens has thus described the riot scene in "Barnaby Rudge":

"The gutters of the street and every crack and fissure in the stones ran with scorching spirit, which being dammed up by busy hands overflowed the road and pavement, and formed a great pool into which the people dropped down dead by dozens. They lay in heaps all round this fearful pond, husbands and wives, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, women with children in their arms and babies at their breasts, and drank until they died. While some stooped their lips to the brink and never raised their heads again, others sprang up from their fiery draught, and danced half in a mad triumph, and half in the agony of suffocation, until they fell and steeped their corpses in the liquor that had killed them."

Next: John Dryden