London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead.
Story time. History time.
I’m just back from guiding a private Legal London walk for a group of American law students. Bright lot. Sharp as tacks. Quick on the uptake. The sort of group where you can casually mention the Star Chamber or the Judicature Acts and nobody looks as though you’ve suddenly started reciting Sanskrit.
Now my third stop on that walk is outside the offices of Farrer & Co in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
And every time I stop there I tell the group a little about the firm. You can hardly not. It’s one of those great old London legal institutions. Deep roots. Old money. Aristocratic connections. Royal connections. The sort of firm that acts for high-net-worth individuals. Which is a modern phrase, of course. But if you think about it, Tempest Slinger was probably handling the 1701 equivalent of high-net-worth individuals from the very beginning.
And yes, the founder really was called Tempest Slinger.
Tempest Slinger. Was ever lawyer better named?
I mean, that’s not a name. That’s a Restoration novel waiting to happen.
He sounds like a man who should either be duelling at dawn in Hyde Park or drinking claret in a Fleet Street tavern while insulting bishops.
Anyway, Tempest Slinger founded the firm in 1701.
And standing there earlier today in Lincoln’s Inn Fields with those American law students, I got to wondering: what sort of world was this? What was happening in London? What was happening in the wider world when Tempest Slinger first hung out his shingle?
Well, first things first, it was a time of dying kings.
James II dies in September 1701. The last Catholic monarch of England. Dead in exile in France.
And William III, William of Orange, only has about a year left himself. He’s already failing physically. Falls from his horse in 1702. Pneumonia follows. Curtains.
Queen Anne is waiting in the wings.
And hanging over everything is uncertainty. Succession anxiety. Political tension. Europe on edge. The Act of Settlement has just been passed. Parliament is effectively deciding the future of the monarchy.
Which means this is a magnificent time for lawyers.
Questions of inheritance. Succession. Property. Titles. Land. Power. Commerce. Charters. Empire. The long eighteenth century is beginning. Britain is turning into a nation of paperwork.
And there in the middle of it is this brand-new law firm.
They didn’t pitch up in their present fine old building until 1790 but no harm in getting the measure of Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1701.
The second oldest square in London – this city of hundreds of squares, the square is to London what canals are to Venice – Lincoln’s Inn Fields was only getting into its stride in 1701. It was a mere 61 years old in 1701.
Pause on that for a moment.
Today it feels ancient. Proper old London. But in Tempest Slinger’s day Lincoln’s Inn Fields was comparatively new. Still carrying that whiff of fresh development. Grand houses going up. Barristers swanning about in wigs and gowns. Sedan chairs jolting through the mud.
And London itself was still rebuilding from the Great Fire.
In fact, St Paul’s Cathedral was not yet finished. Nine more years to go before Christopher Wren’s masterpiece was completed.
So imagine the skyline.
No completed dome yet dominating the city. Scaffolding. Building works. Cranes. Dust. Hammering. Barges on the Thames carrying stone.
And what a city it was.
Coffee houses everywhere. Places where merchants, politicians, pamphleteers, speculators and gossipmongers all collided in clouds of tobacco smoke.
The first daily newspaper, The Daily Courant, is still a year in the future. News travelled more slowly. Rumour travelled very fast indeed.
And elsewhere in the world?
Detroit is founded in 1701 by Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac.
And yes, that Cadillac.
The future tailfins, chrome and pink convertibles are all still somewhere over the horizon. But the name has arrived.
Which means that in the very year Tempest Slinger opened his law practice, halfway across the world a French adventurer whose name will one day gleam on the bonnet of enormous American automobiles is founding Detroit.
Yale College is founded that same year in Connecticut.
And meanwhile in London, a solicitor called Tempest Slinger opens a law practice.
Three very different births. All of them, in one form or another, still with us.
Meanwhile the Duke of Marlborough is beginning the military career that will soon make him the most famous soldier in Europe. Blenheim is still in the future. But the great continental wars are already rumbling into motion.
Captain Kidd, meanwhile, is having a distinctly bad year.
He’s hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping on May 23rd, 1701.
And if you know your old London punishments, Execution Dock was specially designed for pirates. The bodies were left hanging until three tides had washed over them.
That’s London for you. One minute wigs and
coffee houses and elegant legal chambers. The next minute a pirate dangling beside the Thames while the tide rolls in underneath him.
And there are quieter things happening too.
A new synagogue opens in Creechurch Lane for London’s Spanish and Portuguese Jewish community.
Bach is sixteen years old.
Shakespeare has only been dead 85 years. Shakespeare could still be a living memory in 1701.
The Great Fire is unquestionably a living memory. Ditto the Great Plague.
You could still find old Londoners who remembered the smell of the Fire. And remember the Death Carts and that awful cry, ‘Bring Out Your Dead’.
And through all of this Tempest Slinger opens his law practice.
Which survives.
And survives.
And survives.
That’s the extraordinary thing.
Most businesses vanish almost immediately. Most leave no trace whatsoever. A few survive a generation. Fewer survive a century.
But Farrer & Co keeps going.
Through Queen Anne.
Through the Hanoverians.
Through the Jacobite rebellions.
Through Waterloo.
Through Victoria.
Through the First World War.
Through the abdication crisis.
And yes, they were deeply connected to that constitutional earthquake of 1936. Sir Leslie Farrer was a trusted adviser to the Duke of York, the future George VI, during the crisis that brought down Edward VIII.
Then later another partner, Mark Bridges, became solicitor to Queen Elizabeth II and advised the monarchy during some of its most difficult years, including the annus horribilis of 1992.
That continuity is astonishing when you stop and think about it.
A line runs unbroken from Tempest Slinger to the modern royal household.
And somewhere along the line there’s even a Dickens connection. Dickens’ own solicitor and lifelong friend Thomas Mitton became linked to the wider professional and family network that fed into the firm’s story. Which somehow feels exactly right. Dickens and Lincoln’s Inn Fields belong together. Chancery suits. Bleak House fog. Lawyers multiplying like mushrooms in the damp.
And perhaps that’s the real point here.
London is a city where institutions quietly outlive kings.
Kings die.
Governments fall.
Empires rise and collapse.
Newspapers appear.
Detroit is founded.
Yale College is founded.
St Paul’s gets. finished.
The motor car arrives.
The Blitz comes and goes.
The internet appears.
And still there’s a brass plate in Lincoln’s Inn Fields carrying on the same essential business.
Property.
Power.
Money.
Human quarrels.
Human ambition.
Human folly.
The law’s eternal harvest.
And that, I think, is why I enjoy stopping there with those American law students.
Because I’m not just showing them an old law firm.
I’m showing them a survivor.
A survivor older than the United States.
Older than the daily newspaper.
Older than the completion of St Paul’s Cathedral.
Still standing there on the edge of Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Still practising law.
Still very much part of London.
See you tomorrow.